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POEMS 

By 
WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY 



The summer' s jioiver is to the summer sioeet^ 
Though to itself it only li-ve and die. 

SHAKESPEARE 



Sixth Edition 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

153-157 FIFTH AVENUE 
1904 






F/ri? Edition printed January 1898 
Second Edition printed March 1898 
r/5;V</ Edition printed September 1898 
Fourth Edition printed January 1 900 
Fifth Edition printed December 190 1 
Sixth Edition printed August 1903 



Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 



^DFERTISEMENT 

My friend and publisher, Mr. Alfred Ntitt, asks me to introduce 
this re-issue of old work in a new shape. At his request, then, I 
have to say that nearly all the numbers contained in the present 
volume are reprinted from *• A Book of Verses^ (1888) and 
* London Voluntaries ' (1892-3). From the first of these I have 
removed some copies of verse which seemed to me scarce worth 
keeping ; and I have recovered for it certain others from those 
publications which had made room for them. I have corrected where 
I could, added such dates as I might, and, by re- arrangement and 
revision, done my best to give my book, such as it is, its final form. 
If any be displeased by the result, I can but submit that my verses 
are my own, and that this is how I would have them read. 

The ivork of revision has reminded me that, small as is this book 
of mine, it is all in the matter of verse that I have to shonv for the 
years between 1872 and 1897. A principal reason is that, after 
spending the better part of my life in the pursuit of poetry, I found 
myself {about 1877) so utterly unmarketable that I had to own 
myself beaten in art, and to addict myself to journalism for the next 
ten years. Came the production by my old friend, Mr. H. B. 
Donkin, in his little collection of ^ Voluntaries ^ (1888), compiled 
for that East-End Hospital to which he has devoted so much time 
and energy and skill, of those unrhyming rhythms in which I had 
tried to quinfessentialize, as (^/believe) one scarce can do in rhyme, 
my impressions of the Old Edinburgh Infirmary. They had long 



viii ADVERTISEMENT 

since been rejected by every editor of standing in London — I had iv ell- 
nigh said in the ivorld ; but as soon as Mr. Nutt had read them, 
he entreated me to look for more. I did as I -was told ; old dusty 
sheaves ivere dragged to light ; the ivork of selection and correction 
ivas begun ; I burned much ; I found that, after all, the lyrical 
instinct had slept — not died ; I ventured {in brief ^ ^ A Book of 
Verses.^ It ivas received ivith so much interest that I took heart 
once more, and nvrote the numbers presently reprinted from * The 
National Observer^ in the collection first (1892) called^ The Song 
of the Siuord^ and afterivards (1893) 'London Voluntaries.^ If 
I have said nothing since, it is that I have nothing to say 'which is 
not, as yet, too personal — too personal and too afp,icting — for 
utterance. 

For the matter of my book, it is there to speak for itself : — 

' Here '5 a sigh to those ivho lonje me 
And a smile to those ivho hate^ 

I refer to it for the simple pleasure of reflecting that it has made 
me many friends and some enemies. 

W. E. H. 

Musivell Hill, ^th September 1897, 



CONTENTS 



IN HOSPITAL 


I. Enter Patient 


. 


II. Waiting 








III. Interior 








IV. Before . 








V. Operation . 








VI. After . 








VII. Vigil . 








VIII. StafF-Nurse: Old 


Style 






IX. Lady-Probationer 








X. Staff-Nurse : New Style. 






XI. Clinical 








XII. Etching 








XIII. Casualty 








XIV. Ave, Caesar I 








XV. *The Chief 








XVI. House-Surgeon 








XVII. Interlude 








XVIII. Children : Private Ware 






XIX. Scrubber 








XX. Visitor 








XXI. Romance 








XXII. Pastoral 








XXIII. Music . 









PACE 

3 
4 
5 
6 

7 
9 

lO 

14 
15 
16 

19 
21 
23 
24 

25 
26 
28 
29 
30 
31 
33 
35 



X POEMS 

PAGB 

XXIV. Suicide 37 

XXV. Apparition 39 

XXVI. Anterotics 40 

XXVII. Noctum 41 

XXVIII. Discharged 42 

Envoy 44 

The Song of the Sword 47 

Arabian Nights' Entertainments 



57 



BRIC-A-BRAC 



Ballade of a Toyokuni Colour-Print 79 

Ballade of Youth and Age 8 1 

Ballade of Midsummer Days and Nights . . . 83 

Ballade of Dead Actors 85 

Ballade Made in the Hot Weather 87 

Ballade of Truisms ........ 89 

Double Ballade of Life and Fate 91 

Double Ballade of the Nothingness of Things ... 94 

At Queensferry 98 

Orientals .99 

In Fisherrow lOO 

Back-View loi 

Croquis .......... 102 

Attadale, West Highlands 103 

From a Window in Princes Street 104 

In the Dials 105 

The gods are dead , . . . . . . .106 

Let us be drunk . 107 

When you are old 108 

Beside the idle summer sea 109 



CONTENTS 



XI 



The ways of Death are soothing and serene 

We shall surely die . 

What is to come 



PAGE 

no 
III 

112 



ECHOES 

I. To my Mother . . , 

n. Life is bitter .... 

III. O, gather me the rose 

IV. Out of the night that covers me 
V. I am the Reaper 

VI. Praise the generous gods . 

VII. Fill a glass with golden wine . 

VIII. We '11 go no more a-roving 

IX. Madam Life 's a piece in bloom 

X. The sea is full of wandering foam 

XI. Thick is the darkness 

XII. To me at my fifth-floor window 

XIII. Bring her again, O western wind 

XIV. The wan sun westers, faint and slow 
XV. There is a wheel inside my head 

XVI. While the west is paling . 
XVII. The sands are alive with sunshine 
XVIII. The nightingale has a lyre of gold 
XIX. Your heart has trembled to my tongue 
XX. The surges gushed and sounded 
XXI. We flash across the level . 
XXII. The West a glimmering lake of light 

XXIII. The skies are strown with stars 

XXIV. The full sea rolls and thunders 
XXV. In the year that's come and gone 

XXVI. In the placid summer midnight 

XXVII. She sauntered by the swinging seas 



"5 
117 
118 
119 
120 
122 
123 
124 
126 
127 
128 
129 
130 
131 
133 
134 
135 
136 

137 
138 
139 
140 
142 

143 
144 
146 
148 



xu 



POEMS 



XXVIII. Blithe dreams arise to greet us . 

XXIX. A child 

XXX. Kate-a- Whimsies, John-a-Dreams 

XXXI. O, have you blessed, behind the stars 

XXXII. O, Falmouth is a fine town 

XXXIII. The ways are green . 

XXXIV. Life in her creaking shoes . 
XXXV. A late lark twitters from the quiet skies 

XXXVI. I gave my heart to a woman 

XXXVII. Or ever the knightly years were gone , 

XXXVIII. On the way to Kew . 

XXXIX. The past was goodly once . 

XL. The spring, my dear . 

XLI. The Spirit of Wine . 

XLii. A wink from Hesper 

XLiii. Friends ... old friends . .s , 

XLiv, If it should come to be 

XLV. From the brake the Nightingale 

XLVI. In the waste hour 

XLVii. Crosses and troubles . 



PAGE 

149 
152 
154- 
155 
156 
158 
160 
161 
163 
164 
166 
i6g 
169 
170 
172 
173 
175 
179 
178 



LONDON VOLUNTARIES 
I. Grave 185 

II. Andante con Moto .187 

ill. Scherzando . . . . . . . . .192 

IV. Largo e Mesto 186 

V. Allegro Maestoso ....... 200 

RHYMES AND RHYTHivIS 

Prologue 207 

I. Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade . . . .209 
ii. We are the Choice of the Will . .211 



CONTENTS 



Xlll 



III. A desolate shore .... 

IV. It came with the threat of a waning moon 
V. Why, my heart, do we love her so 

VI. One with the ruined sunset 
VII. There 's a regret 
VIII. Time and the Earth 
IX. ' As like the Woman as you can ' 
X. Midsummer midnight skies 
XI. Gulls in an aery morrice. . 
XII. Some starlit garden grey with dew, 

XIII. Under a stagnant sky 

XIV. Fresh from his fastnesses . 
XV. You played and sang a snatch of song 

XVI. Space and dread and the dark . 
XVII. Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Crook 
XVIII. When you wake in your crib . 
XIX. O, Time and Change 
XX. The shadow of Dawn 
XXI. When the wind storms by with a shout 
XXII. Trees and the menace of night . 

XXIII. Here they trysted, here they strayed 

XXIV. Not to the staring Day 
XXV. What have I done for you 

Epilogue ..... 



PAGE 
214 
216 

247 
218 

219 

221 

223 
225 
227 
228 
229 
231 

234 
236 

239 

242 

24-3 
244 
245 
247 
249 
253 

256 



IN HOSPITAL 



1873.1875 



On ne saurait dire a quel point un homme, seul dans son 

lit et malade^ de<vient -personnel, — 

Balzac. 



ENTER PATIENT 

The morning mists still haunt the stony street ; 

The northern summer air is shrill and cold ; 

And lo, the Hospital, grey, quiet, old. 

Where Life and Death like friendly chafferers meet. 

Thro' the loud spaciousness and draughty gloom 

A small, strange child — so aged yet so young ! — 

Her little arm besplinted and beslung, 

Precedes me gravely to the waiting-room. 

I limp behind, my confidence all gone. 

The grey-haired soldier-porter waves me on, 

And on I crawl, and still my spirits fail : 

A tragic meanness seems so to environ 

These corridors and stairs of stone and iron. 

Cold, naked, clean — half-workhouse and half-jail. 



IN HOSPITAL 



II 

WAITING 

A SQUARE, squat room (a cellar on promotion), 
Drab to the soul, drab to the very daylight ; 
Plasters astray in unnatural-looking tinware ; 
Scissors and lint and apothecary's jars. 

Here, on a bench a skeleton would writhe from, 
Angry and sore, I wait to be admitted : 
Wait till my heart is lead upon my stomach. 
While at their ease two dressers do their chores. 

One has a probe — it feels to me a crowbar. 

A small boy sniffs and shudders after bluestonc. 
A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers. 
Life is (I think) a blunder and a shame. 



INTERIOR 



III 
INTERIOR 

The gaunt brown walls 
Look infinite in their decent meanness. 
There is nothing of home in the noisy kettle, 

The fulsome fire. 

The atmosphere 
Suggests the trail of a ghostly druggist. 
Dressings and lint on the long, lean table — 

Whom are they for ? 

The patients yawn, 
Or lie as in training for shroud and coffin. 
A nurse in the corridor scolds and wrangles. 

It 's grim and strange. 

Far footfalls clank. 
The bad burn waits with his head unbandaged. 
My neighbour chokes in the clutch of chloral . . 

O, a gruesome world ! 



IN HOSPITAL 



IV 

BEFORE 

Behold me waiting — waiting for the knife. 

A little while, and at a leap I storm 

The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform, 

The drunken dark, the little death-in-life. 

The gods are good to me : I have no wife, 

No innocent child, to think of as I near 

The fateful minute ; nothing ail-too dear 

Unmans me for my bout of passive strife. 

Yet am I tremulous and a trifle sick, ^ 

And, face to face with chance, I shrink a little : 

My hopes are strong, my will is something weak. 

Here comes the basket? Thank you. I am ready. 

But, gentlemen my porters, life is brittle : 

You carry Cassar and his fortunes — steady ! 



OPERATION 



V 

OPERATION 

You are carried in a basket, 

Like a carcase from the shambles, 

To the theatre, a cockpit 

Where they stretch you on a table. 

Then they bid you close your eyelids. 
And they mask you with a napkin, 
And the anaesthetic reaches 
Hot and subtle through your being. 

And you gasp and reel and shudder 
In a rushing, swaying rapture, 
While the voices at your elbow 
Fade — receding — fainter — farther. 

Lights about you shower and tumble, 
And your blood seems crystallising — 
Edged and vibrant, yet within you 
Racked and hurried back and forward. 



IN HOSPITAL 

Then the lights grow fast and furious, 
And you hear a noise of waters, 
And you wrestle, blind and dizzy, 
In an agony of effort, 

Till a sudden lull accepts you, 

And you sound an utter darkness . 
And awaken . . . with a struggle . 
On a hushed, attentive audience. 



AFTER 



VI 

AFTER 

Like as a flamelet blanketed in smoke, 
So through the anaesthetic shows my life ; 
So flashes and so fades my thought, at strife 
With the strong stupor that I heave and choke 
And sicken at, it is so foully sweet. 
Faces look strange from space — and disappear. 
Far voices, sudden loud, offend my ear — 
And hush as sudden. Then my senses fleet : 
All were a blank, save for this dull, new pain 
That grinds my leg and foot ; and brokenly 
Time and the place glimpse on to me again ; 
Ajid, unsurprised, out of uncertainty, 
I wake — relapsing — somewhat faint and fain, 
To an immense, complacent dreamery. 



lo IN HOSPITAL 



VII 

VIGIL 

Lived on one's back, 
In the long hours of repose, 
Life is a practical nightmare — 
Hideous asleep or awake. 

Shoulders and loins 

Ache ! 

Ache, and the mattress, 
Run into boulders and hummocks, 
Glows like a kiln, while the bedclothes- 
Tumbling, importunate, daft — 
Ramble and roll, and the gas, 
Screwed to its lowermost. 
An inevitable atom of light. 
Haunts, and a stertorous sleeper 
Snores me to hate and despair. 

All the old time 

Surges malignant before me ; 



VIGIL II 

Old voices, old kisses, old songs 

Blossom derisive about me ; 

While the new days 

Pass me in endless procession : 

A pageant of shadows 

Silently, leeringly wending 

Or . . . and still on . . . still on ! 

Far in the stillness a cat 

Languishes loudly. A cinder 

Falls, and the shadows 

Lurch to the leap of the flame. The next 

man to me 
Turns with a moan ; and the snorer, 
The drug like a rope at his throat. 
Gasps, gurgles, snorts himself free, as the 

night-nurse, 
Noiseless and strange. 
Her bull's eye half-lanterned in apron 
(Whispering me, *Are ye no sleepin* yet? '), 
Passes, list-slippered and peering. 
Round . . . and is gone. 

Sleep comes at last — 

Sleep full of dreams and misgivings — 



12 IN HOSPITAL 

Broken with brutal and sordid 
Voices and sounds that impose on me, 
Ere I can wake to it, 
The unnatural, intolerable day. 



STAFF-NURSE : OLD STYLE 13 



VIII 

STAFF-NURSE : OLD STYLE 

The greater masters of the commonplace, 
Rembrandt and good Sir Walter — only these 
Could paint her all to you : experienced ease 
And antique liveliness and ponderous grace ; 
The sweet old roses of her sunken face ; 
The depth and malice of her sly, grey eyes ; 
The broad Scots tongue that flatters, scolds, defies , 
The thick Scots wit that fells you like a mace. 
These thirty years has she been nursing here, 
Some of them under Syme, her hero still. 
Much is she worth, and even more is made of her. 
Patients and students hold her very dear. 
The doctors love her, tease her, use her skill. 
They say * The Chief himself is half-afraid of her. 



14 IN HOSPITAL 



IX 

LADY-PROBATIONER 

Some three, or five, or seven, and thirty years ; 

A Roman nose ; a dimpling double-chin ; 

Dark eyes and shy that, ignorant of sin, 

Are yet acquainted, it would seem, with tears ; 

A comely shape ; a slim, high-coloured hand, 

Graced, rather oddly, with a signet ring ; 

A bashful air, becoming everything ; 

A well-bred silence always at command. 

Her plain print gown, prim cap, and bright steel 

chain 
Look out of place on her, and I remain 
Absorbed in her, as in a pleasant mystery. 
Quick, skilful, quiet, soft in speech and touch . . . 
' Do you like nursing ? ' * Yes, Sir, very much.* 
Somehow, I rather think she has a history. 



STAFF-NURSE: NEW STYLE 15 



STAFF-NURSE: NEW STYLE 

Blue-eyed and bright of face but waning fast 

Into the sere of virginal decay, 

I view her as she enters, day by day, 

As a sweet sunset almost overpast. 

Kindly and calm, patrician to the last, 

Superbly falls her gown of sober gray, 

And on her chignon^s elegant array 

The plainest cap is somehow touched with caste. 

She talks Beethoven ; frowns disapprobation 

At Balzac's name, sighs it at * poor George 

Sand's ' ; 
Knows that she has exceeding pretty hands ; 
Speaks Latin with a right accentuation ; 
And gives at need (as one who understands) 
Draught, counsel, diagnosis, exhortation. 



i6 IN HOSPITAL 



XI 

CLINICAL 

Hist? . . . 

Through the corridor's echoes, 

Louder and nearer 

Comes a great shuffling of feet. 

Quick, every one of you, 

Straight your quilts, and be decent ! 

Here 's the Professor. 

In he comes first 

With the bright look we know, 

From the broad, white brows the kind eyes 

Soothing yet nerving you. Here at his elbow, 

White-capped, white-aproned, the Nurse, 

Towel on arm and her inkstand 

Fretful with quills. 

Here in the ruck, anyhow, 



CLINICAL 17 

Surging along, 

Louts, duffers, exquisites, students, and prigs — 

Whiskers and foreheads, scarf-pins and spectacles — 

Hustles the Class ! And they ring themselves 

Round the first bed, where the Chief 

(His dressers and clerks at attention), 

Bends in inspection already. 

So shows the ring 

Seen from behind round a conjurer 

Doing his pitch in the street. 

High shoulders, low shoulders, broad shoulders, 

narrow ones. 
Round, square, and angular, serry and shove ; 
While from within a voice. 
Gravely and weightily fluent, 
Sounds ; and then ceases ; and suddenly 
(Look at the stress of the shoulders !) 
Out of a quiver of silence, 
Over the hiss of the spray, 
Comes a low cry, and the sound 
Of breath quick intaken through teeth 
Clenched in resolve. And the Master 
Breaks from the crowd, and goes, 
Wiping his hands, 

B 



i8 IN HOSPITAL 

To the next bed, with his pupils 
Flocking and whispering behind him. 

Now one can see. 

Case Number One 

Sits (rather pale) with his bedclothes 

Stripped up, and showing his foot 

(Alas for God's Image !) 

Swaddled in wet, white lint 

Brilliantly hideous with red 



ETCHING 19 



XII 

ETCHING 

Two and thirty is the ploughman. 
He 's a man of gallant inches, 
And his hair is close and curly, 

And his beard ; 
But his face is wan and sunken, 
And his eyes are large and brilliant, 
And his shoulder-blades are sharp. 

And his knees. 

He is weak of wits, religious. 
Full of sentiment and yearning, 
Gentle, faded — with a cough 

And a snore. 
When his wife (who was a widow. 
And is many years his elder) 
Fails to write, and that is always, 

He desponds. ' 



20 IN HOSPITAL 

Let his melancholy wander, 
And he '11 tell you pretty stories 
Of the women that have wooed him 

Long ago ; 
Or he '11 sing of bonnie lasses 
Keeping sheep among the heather, 
With a crackling, hackling chck 

In his voice. 



CASUALTY 21 



XIII 

CASUALTY 

As with varnish red and glistening 

Dripped his hair ; his feet looked rigid ; 
Raised, he settled stiffly sideways : 
You could see his hurts were spinal. 

He had fallen from an engine, 

And been dragged along the metals. 
It was hopeless, and they knew it ; 
So they covered him, and left him. 

As he lay, by fits half sentient. 
Inarticulately moaning. 
With his stockinged soles protruded 
Stark and awkward from the blankets, 

To his bed there came a woman. 

Stood and looked and sighed a little, 
And departed without speaking, 
As himself a few hours after. 



22 IN HOSPITAL 

I was told it was his sweetheart. 
They were on the eve of marriage. 
She was quiet as a statue, 
But her lip was grey and writhe n. 



AVE, CAESAR 23 



XIV 



AVE, CAESAR ! 

From the winter's grey despair, 
From the summer's golden languor, 
Death, the lover of Life, 
Frees us for ever. 

Inevitable, silent, unseen, 

Everywhere always, 

Shadow by night and as light in the dayj 

Signs she at last to her chosen ; 

And, as she waves them forth, 

Sorrow and Joy 

Lay by their looks and their voices, 

Set down their hopes, and are made 

One in the dim Forever. 

Into the winter's grey delight. 
Into the summer's golden dream, 
Holy and high and impartial, 
Death, the mother of Life, 
Mingles all men for ever. 



24 IN HOSPITAL 



XV 

'THE CHIEF' 

His brow spreads large and placid, and his eye 

Is deep and bright, with steady looks that still. 

Soft lines of tranquil thought his face fulfill — 

His face at once benign and proud and shy. 

If envy scout, if ignorance deny, 

His faultless patience, his unyielding will, 

Beautiful gentleness and splendid skill, 

Innumerable gratitudes reply. 

His wise, rare smile is sweet with certainties. 

And seems in all his patients to compel 

Such love and faith as failure cannot quell. 

We hold him for another Herakles, 

Battling with custom, prejudice, disease. 

As once the son of Zeus with Death and Hell. 



HOUSE-SURGEON 25 



XVI 

HOUSE-SURGEON 

Exceeding tall, but built so well his height 
Half-disappears in flow of chest and limb ; 
Moustache and whisker trooper-like in trim ; 
Frank-faced, frank-eyed, frank-hearted; always 

bright 
And always punctual — morning, noon, and 

night ; 
Bland as a Jesuit, sober as a hymn ; 
Humorous, and yet without a touch of whim ; 
Gentle and amiable, yet full of fight. 
His piety, though fresh and true in strain. 
Has not yet whitewashed up his common mood 
To the dead blank of his particular Schism. 
Sweet, unaggressive, tolerant, most humane, 
Wild artists like his kindly elder hood, 
And cultivate his mild Philistinism. 



26 IN HOSPITAL 



XVII 

INTERLUDE 

O, THE fun, the fun and frolic 

That The Wind that Shakes the Barley 
Scatters through a penny-whistle 
Tickled with artistic fingers ! 

Kate the scrubber (forty summers, 
Stout but sportive) treads a measure, 
Grinning, in herself a ballet. 
Fixed as fate upon her audience. 

Stumps are shaking, crutch-supported ; 
Splinted fingers tap the rhythm ; 
And a head all helmed with plasters 
Wags a measured approbation. 

Of their mattress-life oblivious, 

All the patients, brisk and cheerful, 
Are encouraging the dancer. 
And applauding the musician. 



INTERLUDE ^^ 

Dim the gas-lights in the output 
Of so many ardent smokers, 
Full of shadow lurch the corners, 
And the doctor peeps and passes. 

There are, maybe, some suspicions 
Of an alcoholic presence . . . 
* Tak' a sup of this, my wumman ! * . . , 
New Year comes but once a twelvemonth 



28 IN HOSPITAL 



xviir 

CHILDREN: PRIVATE WARD 

Here in this dim, dull, double-bedded room, 

I play the father to a brace of boys, 

Ailing but apt for every sort of noise, 

Bedfast but brilliant yet with health and bloom. 

Roden, the Irishman, is ' sieven past,' 

Blue-eyed, snub-nosed, chubby, and fair of face. 

Willie's but six, and seems to like the place, 

A cheerful little collier to the last. 

They eat, and laugh, and sing, and fight, all day ; 

All night they sleep like dormice. See them 

play 
At Operations : — Roden, the Professor, 
Saws, lectures, takes the artery up, and ties ; 
Willie, self-chloroformed, with half-shut eyes, 
Holding the limb and moaning — Case and 

Dresser. 



SCRUBBER 29 



XIX 

SCRUBBER 

She's tall and gaunt, and in her hard, sad face 
With flashes of the old fun's animation 
There lowers the fixed and peevish resignation 
Bred of a past where troubles came apace. 
She tells me that her husband, ere he died, 
Saw seven of their children pass away, 
And never knew the little lass at play 
Out on the green, in whom he's deified. 
Her kin dispersed, her friends forgot and gone, 
All simple faith her honest Irish mind, 
Scolding her spoiled young saint, she labours on : 
Telling her dreams, taking her patients' part, 
Trailing her coat sometimes : and you shall find 
No rougher, quainter speech, nor kinder heart. 



30 IN HOSPITAL 



XX 

VISITOR 

Her little face is like a walnut shell 

With wrinkling lines ; her soft, white hair adorns 

Her withered brows in quaint, straight curls, like 

horns ; 
And all about her clings an old, sweet smell. 
Prim is her gown and quakerlike her shawl. 
Well might her bonnets have been born on her. 
Can you conceive a Fairy Godmother 
The subject of a strong religious call ^ 
In snow or shine, from bed to bed she runs, 
All twinkling smiles and texts and pious tales, 
Her mittened hands, that ever give or pray, 
Bearing a sheaf of tracts, a bag of buns : 
A wee old maid that sweeps the Bridegroom's way, 
Strong in a cheerful trust that never fails. 



ROMANCE 31 



XXI 

ROMANCE 

* Talk of pluck ! ' pursued the Sailor , 

Set at euchre on his elbow, 

' I was on the wharf at Charleston, 

Just ashore from off the runner. 

* It was grey and dirty weather, 

And I heard a drum go rolling, 
Rub-a-dubbing in the distance, 
Awful dour-like and defiant. 

* In and out among the cotton. 

Mud, and chains, and stores, and anchors, 
Tramped a squad of battered scarecrows — 
Poor old Dixie's bottom dollar ! 

' Some had shoes, but all had rifles. 

Them that wasn't bald was beardless. 
And the drum was rolling Dixie, 
And they stepped to it like men, sir ! 



32 IN HOSPITAL 

* Rags and tatters, belts and bayonets, 
On they swung, the drum a-rolling, 
Mum and sour. It looked like fighting, 
And they meant it too, by thunder ! * 



PASTORAL 33 



XXII 

PASTORAL 

It 's the Spring. 

Earth has conceived, and her bosom, 

Teeming with summer, is glad. 

Vistas of change and adventure, 

Thro' the green land 

The grey roads go beckoning and winding, 

Peopled with wains, and melodious 

With harness-bells jangling : 

Jangling and twangling rough rhythms 

To the slow march of the stately, great horses 

Whistled and shouted along. 

White fleets of cloud. 

Argosies heavy with fruitfulness, 

Sail the blue peacefully. Green flame the hedgerows. 

Blackbirds are bugling, and white in wet winds 

Sway the tall poplars. 

c 



34 IN HOSPITAL 

Pageants of colour and fragrance, 
Pass the sweet meadows, and viewless 
Walks the mild spirit of May, 
Visibly blessing the world. 

O, the brilliance of blossoming orchards ! 

O, the savour and thrill of the woods. 

When their leafage is stirred 

By the flight of the Angel of Rain ! 

Loud lows the steer ; in the fallows 

Rooks are alert ; and the brooks 

Gurgle and tinkle and trill. Thro' the gloamings, 

Under the rare, shy stars. 

Boy and girl wander. 

Dreaming in darkness and dew. 

It 's the Spring. 

A sprightliness feeble and squalid 
Wakes in the ward, and I sicken, 
Impotent, winter at heart. 



MUSIC 35 



XXIII 

MUSIC 

Down the quiet eve, 
Thro' my window with the sunset 
Pipes to me a distant organ 
Foolish ditties ; 

And, as when you change 
Pictures in a magic lantern, 
Books, beds, bottles, floor, and ceiling 
Fade and vanish. 

And I 'm well once more. . . . 
August flares adust and torrid, 
But my heart is full of April 
Sap and sweetness. 

In the quiet eve 

I am loitering, longing, dreaming . . , 
Dreaming, and a distant organ 
Pipes me ditties. 



36 IN HOSPITAL 

I can see the shop, 
I can smell the sprinkled pavement, 
Where she serves — her chestnut chignon 
Thrills my senses ! 

O, the sight and scent. 
Wistful eve and perfumed pavement ! 
In the distance pipes an organ . . . 
The sensation 

Comes to me anew, 
And my spirit for a moment 
Thro' the music breathes the blessed 
Airs of London. 



SUICIDE 37 



XXIV 

SUICIDE 

Staring corpselike at the ceiling, 
See his harsh, unrazored features, 
Ghastly brown against the pillow. 
And his throat — so strangely bandaged ! 

Lack of work and lack of victuals, 
A debauch of smuggled whisky. 
And his children in the workhouse 
Made the world so black a riddle 

That he plunged for a solution ; 

And, although his knife was edgeless, 

He was sinking fast towards one, 

When they came, and found, and saved him. 

Stupid now with shame and sorrow, 
In the night I hear him sobbing. 
But sometimes he talks a little. 
He has told me all his troubles. 



38 IN HOSPITAL 

In his broad face, tanned and bloodless, 
White and wild his eyeballs glisten ; 
And his smile, occult and tragic, 
Yet so slavish, makes you shudder ! 



APPARITION 39 



XXV 

APPARITION 

Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably, 
Neat-footed and weak-fingered : in his face — 
Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched 

with race. 
Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, 
The brown eyes radiant with vivacity — 
There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, 
A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace 
Of passion and impudence and energy. 
Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck. 
Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, 
Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist : 
A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, 
Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all. 
And something of the Shorter-Catechist. 



40 IN HOSPITAL 



XXVI 

ANTEROTICS 

Laughs the happy April morn 
Thro' my grimy, little window, 
And a shaft of sunshine pushes 
Thro* the shadows in the square. 

Dogs are tracing thro' the grass, 
Crows are cawing round the chimneys, 
In and out among the washing 
Goes the West at hide-and-seek. 

Loud and cheerful clangs the bell. 
Here the nurses troop to breakfast. 
Handsome, ugly, all are women . . . 
O, the Spring — the Spring — the Spring ! 



NOCTURN 



41 



XXVII 

NOCTURN 

At the barren heart of midnight, 
When the shadow shuts and opens 
As the loud flames pulse and flutter, 
I can hear a cistern leaking. 

Dripping, dropping, in a rhythm, 
Rough, unequal, half-melodious, 
Like the measures aped from nature 
In the infancy of music ; 

Like the buzzing of an insect, 
Still, irrational, persistent . . . 
I must listen, listen, listen 
In a passion of attention ; 

Till it taps upon my heartstrings, 
And my very life goes dripping, 
Dropping, dripping, drip-drip-dropping, 
In the drip-drop of the cistern. 



42 IN HOSPITAL 



XXVIII 

DISCHARGED 

Carry me out 

Into the wind and the sunshine, 

Into the beautiful world. 

O, the wonder, the spell of the streets ! 
The stature and strength of the horses, 
The rustle and echo of footfalls, 
The flat roar and rattle of wheels ! 
A swift tram floats huge on us . . . 
It 's a dream ? 

The smell of the mud in my nostrils 
Blows brave — like a breath of the sea ! 

As of old, 

Ambulant, undulant drapery, 
Vaguely and strangely provocative. 
Flutters and beckons. O, yonder — 
Is it ? — the gleam of a stocking ! 
Sudden, a spire 



DISCHARGED 43 

Wedged in the mist ! O, the houses, 
The long lines of lofty, grey houses, 
Cross-hatched with shadow and light ! 
These are the streets. . . . 
Each is an avenue leading 
Whither I will ! 

Free . . . ! 

Dizzy, hysterical, faint, 

I sit, and the carriage rolls on with me 

Into the wonderful world. 



The Old Infirmary, Edinburgh, 1873-75 



44 IN HOSPITAL 



ENVOY 

^0 Charles Baxter 

Do you remember 

That afternoon — that Sunday afternoon ! — 

When, as the kirks were ringing in, 

And the grey city teemed 

With Sabbath feelings and aspects, 

Lewis — our Lewis then, 

Now the whole world's — and you, 

Young, yet in shape most like an elder, came, 

Laden with Balzacs 

(Big, yellow books, quite impudently French), 

The first of many times 

To that transformed back-kitchen where I lay 

So long, so many centuries — 

Or years is it ! — ago ? 

Dear Charles, since then 
We have been friends, Lewis and you and I, 
(How good it sounds, * Lewis and you and I ! ') 
Such friends, I like to think, 



ENVOY 45 

That in us three, Lewis and me and you, 

Is something of that gallant dream 

Which old Dumas — the generous, the humane. 

The seven-and-seventy times to be forgiven ! — 

Dreamed for a blessing to the race, 

The immortal Musketeers, 

Our Athos rests — the wise, the kind, 

The liberal and august, his fault atoned, 

Rests in the crowded yard 

There at the west of Princes Street. We three — 

You, I, and Lewis ! — still afoot, 

Are still together, and our lives, 

In chime so long, may keep 

(God bless the thought !) 

Unj angled till the end. 

W. E. H. 

Chiswick, March 1888 



THE SONG 
OF THE SWORD 

{To Rudyard Kipling) 



1890 



'The Sword 

Singing — 

T^he voice of the Sword from the heart of 

the Sword 
Clanging imperious 
Forth from 'Time's battlements 
His ancient and triumphing Song. 

In the beginning, 
Ere God inspired Himself 
Into the clay thing 
Thumbed to His image, 
The vacant, the naked shell 
Soon to be Man : 
Thoughtful He pondered It, 
Prone there and impotent, 



50 THE SONG OF THE SWORD 

Fragile, inviting 

Attack and discomfiture ; 

Then, with a smile — 

As He heard in the Thunder 

That laughed over Eden 

The voice of the Trumpet, 

The iron Beneficence, 

Calling his dooms 

To the Winds of the world — 

Stooping, He drew 

On the sand with His finger 

A shape for a sign 

Of his way to the eyes 

That in wonder should waken, 

For a proof of His will 

To the breaking intelligence. 

That was the birth of me : 

I am the Sword. 

Bleak and lean, grey and cruel, 
Short-hiked, long shafted, 
I froze into steel ; 
And the blood of my elder. 
His hand on the hafts of me, 
Sprang like a wave 



THE SONG OF THE SWORD 

In the wind, as the sense 

Of his strength grew to ecstasy ; 

Glowed like a coal 

In the throat of the furnace ; 

As he knew me and named me 

The War-Thing, the Comrade, 

Father of honour 

And giver of kingship. 

The fame-smith, the song-master. 

Bringer of women 

On fire at his hands 

For the pride of fulfilment. 

Priest (saith the Lord) 

Of his marriage with victory. 

Ho ! then, the Trumpet, 

Handmaid of heroes, 

Calling the peers 

To the place of espousals ! 

Ho ! then, the splendour 

And glare of my ministry, 

Clothing the earth 

With a livery of lightnings ! 

Ho ! then, the music 

Of battles in onset, 

And ruining armours, 



52 THE SONG OF THE SWORD 

And God's gift returning 

In fury to God ! 

Thrilling and keen 

As the song of the winter stars, 

Ho ! then, the sound 

Of my voice, the implacable 

Angel of Destiny ! — - 

I am the Sword. 

Heroes, my children, 

Follow, O, follow me ! 

Follow, exulting 

In the great light that breaks 

From the sacred Companionship ! 

Thrust through the fatuous, 

Thrust through the fungous brood, 

Spawned in my shadow 

And gross with my gift ! 

Thrust through, and hearken 

O, hark, to the Trumpet, 

The Virgin of Battles, 

Calling, still calling you 

Into the Presence, 

Sons of the Judgment, 

Pure wafts of the Will ! 



THE SONG OF THE SWORD 53 

Edged to annihilate, 

Hiked with government, 

Follow, O, follow me, 

Till the waste places 

All the grey globe over 

Ooze, as the honeycomb 

Drips, with the sweetness 

Distilled of my strength, 

And, teeming in peace 

Through the wrath of my coming, 

They give back in beauty 

The dread and the anguish 

They had of me visitant ! 

Follow, O follow, then. 

Heroes, my harvesters 1 

Where the tall grain is ripe 

Thrust in your sickles ! 

Stripped and adust 

In a stubble of empire, 

Scything and binding 

The full sheaves of sovranty : 

Thus, O, thus gloriously. 

Shall you fulfil yourselves ! 

Thus, O, thus mightily. 

Show yourselves sons of mine — 



54 THE SONG OF THE SWORD 

Yea, and win grace of me : 
I am the Sword ! 



I am the feast-maker : 
Hark, through a noise 
Of the screaming of eagles, 
Hark how the Trumpet, 
The mistress of mistresses. 
Calls, silver-throated 
And stern, where the tables 
Are spread, and the meal 
Of the Lord is in hand ! 
Driving the darkness, 
Even as the banners 
And spears of the Morning ; 
Sifting the nations. 
The slag from the metal, 
The waste and the weak 
From the fit and the strong ; 
Fighting the brute, 
The abysmal Fecundity ; 
Checking the gross, 
Multitudinous blunders, 
The groping, the purblind 



THE SONG OF THE SWORD 55 

Excesses in service 
Of the Womb universal, 
The absolute drudge ; 
Firing the charactry 
Carved on the World, 
The miraculous gem 
In the seal-ring that burns 
On the hand of the Master — 
Yea ! and authority 
Flames through the dim, 
Unappeasable Grisliness 
Prone down the nethermost 
Chasms of the Void ! — 
Clear singing, clean slicing ; 
Sweet spoken, soft finishing ; 
Making death beautiful, 
Life but a coin 
To be staked in the pastime 
Whose playing is more 
Than the transfer of being ; 
Arch-anarch, chief builder. 
Prince and evangelist, 
I am the Will of God : 
I am the Sword. 



56 THE SONG OF THE SWORD 

The Sword 

Singing — 

The voice of the Sword from the heart 

of the Sword 
Clanging majesticaly 
As from the starry-staired 
Courts of the primal Supremacy, 
His high, irresistible song. 



ARABIAN NIGHTS' 

ENTERTAINMENTS 

{To Elizabeth Robins Pennell) 



'893 



< O mes cheres Mille et Une Nuits ! ' — Fantasia. 

Once on a time 

There was a little boy : a master-mage 

By virtue of a Book 

Of magic — O, so magical it filled 

His life with visionary pomps 

Processional ! And Powers 

Passed with him where he passed. And Thrones 

And Dominations, glaived and plumed and mailed, 

Thronged in the criss-cross streets. 

The palaces pell-mell with playing-fields. 

Domes, cloisters, dungeons, caverns, tents, arcades, 

Of the unseen, silent City, in his soul 

Pavilioned jealously, and hid 

As in the dusk, profound. 

Green stillnesses of some enchanted mere. 

I shut mine eyes. ... And lo ! 

A flickering snatch of memory that floats 



6o ARABIAN NIGHTS' 

Upon the face of a pool of darkness five 

And thirty dead years deep, 

Antic in girlish broideries 

And skirts and silly shoes with straps 

And a broad-ribanded leghorn, he walks 

Plain in the shadow of a church 

(St. Michael's : in whose brazen call 

To curfew his first wails of wrath were whelmed). 

Sedate for all his haste 

To be at home ; and, nestled in his arm, 

Inciting still to quiet and solitude, 

Boarded in sober drab. 

With small, square, agitating cuts 

Let in a-top of the double-columned, close, 

Quakerlike print, a Book ! . . . 

What but that blessed brief 

Of what is gallantest and best 

In all the full-shelved Libraries of Romance ? 

The Book of rocs. 

Sandalwood, ivory, turbans, ambergris. 

Cream-tarts, and lettered apes, and calendars. 

And ghouls, and genies — O, so huge 

They might have overed the tall Minster Tower 

Hands down, as schoolboys take a post ! 

In truth, the Book of Camaralzaman, 



ENTERTAINMENTS 6i 

Schemselnihar and Sindbad, Scheherezade 

The peerless, Bedreddin, Badroulbadour, 

Cairo and Serendib and Candahar, 

And Caspian, and the dim, terrific bulk — 

Ice-ribbed, fiend-visited, isled in spells and storms — 

Of Kaf ! . . . That centre of miracles, 

The sole, unparalleled Arabian Nights ! 



Old friends I had a-many — kindly and grim 

Familiars, cronies quaint 

And goblin ! Never a Wood but housed 

Some morrice of dainty dapperlings. No Brook 

But had his nunnery 

Of green-haired, silvry-curving sprites, 

To cabin in his grots, and pace 

His lilied margents. Every lone Hillside 

Might open upon Elf-Land. Every Stalk 

That curled about a Bean-stick was of the breed 

Of that live ladder by whose delicate rungs 

You climbed beyond the clouds, and found 

The Farm-House where the Ogre, gorged 

And drowsy, from his great oak chair. 

Among the flitches and pewters at the fire, 

Called for his Faery Harp. And in it flew, 



62 ARABIAN NIGHTS* 

And, perching on the kitchen table, sang 

Jocund and jubilant, with a sound 

Of those gay, golden-vowelled madrigals 

The shy thrush at mid-May 

Flutes from wet orchards flushed with the triumph- 
ing dawn ; 

Or blackbirds rioting as they listened still. 

In old-world woodlands rapt with an old-world 
spring, 

For Pan's own whistle, savage and rich and lewd, 

And mocked him call for call ! 



I could not pass 
The half-door where the cobbler sat in view 
Nor figure me the wizen Leprechaun, 
In square-cut, faded reds and buckle-shoes, 
Bent at his work in the hedge-side, and know 
Just how he tapped his brogue, and twitched 
His wax-end this and that way, both with wrists 
And elbows. In the rich June fields, 
Where the ripe clover drew the bees, 
And the tall quakers trembled, and the West Wind 
Lolled his half-holiday away 
Beside me lolling and lounging through my own, 



ENTERTAINMENTS 63 

*Twas good to follow the Miller's Youngest Son 

On his white horse along the leafy lanes ; 

For at his stirrup linked and ran, 

Not cynical and trapesing, as he loped 

From wall to wall above the espaliers. 

But in the bravest tops 

That market-town, a town of tops, could show : 

Bold, subtle, adventurous, his tail 

A banner flaunted in disdain 

Of human stratagems and shifts : 

King over All the Catlands, present and past 

And future, that moustached 

Artificer of fortunes, Puss-in-Boots ! 

Or Bluebeard's Closet, with its plenishing 

Of meat-hooks, sawdust, blood. 

And wives that hung like fresh-dressed carcases — 

Odd-fangled, most a butcher's, part 

A faery chamber hazily seen 

And hazily figured — on dark afternoons 

And windy nights was visiting of the best. 

Then, too, the pelt of hoofs 

Out in the roaring darkness told 

Of Heme the Hunter in his antlered helm 

Galloping, as with despatches from the Pit, 

Between his hell-born Hounds. 



64 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 

And Rip Van Winkle . . . often I lurked to hear, 
Outside the long, low timbered, tarry wall, 
The mutter and rumble of the trolling bowls 
Down the lean plank, before they fluttered the pins ; 
For, listening, I could help him play 
His wonderful game. 

In those blue, booming hills, with Mariners 
Refreshed from kegs not coopered in this our 
world. 

But what were these so near, 

So neighbourly fancies to the spell that brought 

The run of Ali Baba's Cave 

Just for the saying * Open Sesame,' 

With gold to measure, peck by peck, 

In round, brown wooden stoups 

You borrowed at the chandler's ? ... Or one time 

Made you Aladdin's friend at school. 

Free of his Garden of Jewels, Ring and Lamp 

In perfect trim ? ... Or Ladies, fair 

For all the embrowning scars in their white breasts, 

Went labouring under some dread ordinance, 

Which made them whip, and bitterly cry the while, 

Strange Curs that cried as they, 

Till there was never a Black Bitch of all 



ENTERTAINMENTS 65 

Your consorting but might havQ gone 
Spell-driven miserably for crimes 
Done in the pride of womanhood and desire . . . 
Or at the ghostliest altitudes of night, 
While you lay wondering and acold, 
Your sense was fearfully purged ; and soon 
Queen Labe, abominable and dear, 
Rose from your side, opened the Box of Doom, 
Scattered the yellow powder (which I saw 
Like sulphur at the Docks in bulk). 
And muttered certain words you could not hear ; 
And there ! a living stream. 

The brook you bathed in, with its weeds and flags 
And cresses, glittered and sang 
Out of the hearthrug over the nakedness. 
Fair -scrubbed and decent, of your bedroom 
floor ! . . . 

I was — how many a time ! — 

That Second Calendar, Son of a King, 

On whom 'twas vehemently enjoined, 

Pausing at one mysterious door, 

To pry no closer, but content his soul 

With his kind Forty. Yet I could not rest 

For idleness and ungovernable Fate. 

E 



66 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 

And the Black Horse, which fed on sesame 

(That wonder-working word !), 

Vouchsafed his back to me, and spread his vans, 

And soaring, soaring on 

From air to air, came charging to the ground 

Sheer, like a lark from the midsummer clouds. 

And, shaking me out of the saddle, where I 

sprawled 
Flicked at me with his tail, 
And left me blinded, miserable, distraught 
(Even as I was in deed, 

When doctors came, and odious things were done 
On my poor tortured eyes 
With lancets ; or some evil acid stung 
And wrung them like hot sand, 
And desperately from room to room 
Fumble I must my dark, disconsolate way), 
To get to Bagdad how I might. But there 
I met with Merry Ladies. O you three — 
Safie, Amine, Zobeide — when my heart 
Forgets you all shall be forgot ! 
And so we supped, we and the rest. 
On wine and roasted lamb, rose-water, dates. 
Almonds, pistachios, citrons. And Haroun 
Laughed out of his lordly beard 



ENTERTAINMENTS 67 

On GiafFar and Mesrour (/ knew the Three 

For all their Mossoul habits). And outside 

The Tigris, flowing swift 

Like Severn bend for bend, twinkled and gleamed ^^ 

With broken and wavering shapes of stranger 

stars ; 
The vast, blue night 
Was murmurous with peris' plumes 
And the leathern wings of genies ; words of power 
Were whispering ; and old fishermen. 
Casting their nets with prayer, might draw to shore 
Dead loveliness : or a prodigy in scales 
Worth in the Caliph's Kitchen pieces of gold : 
Or copper vessels, stopped with lead. 
Wherein some Squire of Eblis watched and railed, 
In durance under potent charactry 
Graven by the seal of Solomon the King. . . . 

Then, as the Book was glassed 

In Life as in some olden mirror's quaint, 

Bewildering angles, so would Life 

Flash light on light back on the Book ; and both 

Were changed. Once in a house decayed 

From better days, harbouring an errant show 

(For all its stories of dry-rot 



68 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 

Were filled with gruesome visitants in wax, 
Inhuman, hushed, ghastly with Painted Eyes), 
I wandered ; and no living soul 
Was nearer than the pay-box ; and I stared 
Upon them staring — staring. Till at last, 
Three sets of rafters from the streets, 
I strayed upon a mildewed, rat-run room, 
With the two Dancers, horrible and obscene, 
Guarding the door : and there, in a bedroom-set, 
Behind a fence of faded crimson cords. 
With an aspect of frills 
And dimities and dishonoured privacy 
That made you hanker and hesitate to look, 
A Woman with her litter of Babes — all slain. 
All in their nightgowns, all with Painted Eyes 
Staring — still staring ; so that I turned and ran 
As for my neck, but in the street 
Took breath. The same, it seemed, 
And yet not all the same, I was to find, 
As I went up ! For afterwards, 
Whenas I went my round alone — 
All day alone — in long, stern, silent streets. 
Where I might stretch my hand and take 
Whatever I would : still there were Shapes o; 
Stone, . 



ENTERTAINMENTS 69 

Motionless, lifelike, frightening — for the Wrath 

Had smitten them ; but they watched, 

This by her melons and figs, that by his rings 

And chains and watches, with the hideous gaze. 

The Painted Eyes insufferable, 

Now, of those grisly images ; and I 

Pursued my best-beloved quest, 

Thrilled with a novel and delicious fear. 

So the night fell — with never a lamplighter ; 

And through the Palace of the King 

I groped among the echoes, and I felt 

That they were there, 

Dreadfully there, the Painted staring Eyes, 

HaU after hall . . . Till lo ! from far 

A Voice ! And in a little while 

Two tapers burning ! And the Voice, 

Heard in the wondrous Word of God, was — whose? 

Whose but Zobeide's, 

The lady of my heart, like me 

A True Believer, and like me 

An outcast thousands of leagues beyond the pale ! . . . 

Or, sailing to the Isles 

Of Khaledan, I spied one evenfall 

A black blotch in the sunset ; and it grew 



70 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 

Swiftly . . . and grew. Tearing their beards, 
The sailors wept and prayed ; but the grave ship, 
Deep laden with spiceries and pearls, went mad. 
Wrenched the long tiller out of the steersman's 

hand. 
And, turning broadside on, 
As the most iron would, was haled and sucked 
Nearer, and nearer yet ; 
And, all awash, with horrible lurching leaps 
Rushed at that Portent, casting a shadow now 
That swallowed sea and sky ; and then. 
Anchors and nails and bolts 

Flew screaming out of her, and with clang on clang, 
A noise of fifty stithies, caught at the sides 
Of the Magnetic Mountain ; and she lay, 
A broken bundle of firewood, strown piecemeal 
About the waters ; and her crew 
Passed shrieking, one by one ; and I was left 
To drown. All the long night I swam ; 
But in the morning, O, the smiling coast 
Tufted with date-trees, meadowlike. 
Skirted with shelving sands ! And a great wave 
Cast me ashore ; and I was saved alive. 
So, giving thanks to God, I dried my clothes, 
And, faring inland, in a desert place 



ENTERTAINMENTS 71 

I stumbled on an iron ring — 

The fellow of fifty built into the Quays : 

When, scenting a trap-door, 

I dug, and dug ; until my biggest blade 

Stuck into wood. And then, 

The flight of smooth-hewn, easy-falling stairs. 

Sunk in the naked rock ! The cool, clean vault, 

So neat with niche on niche it might have been 

Our beer-cellar but for the rows 

Of brazen urns (like monstrous chemist's jars) 

Full to the wide, squat throats 

With gold-dust, but a-top 

A layer of pickled-walnut-looking things 

I knew for olives ! And far, O, far away, 

The Princess of China languished ! Far away 

Was marriage, with a Vizier and a Chief 

Of Eunuchs and the privilege 

Of going out at night 

To play — unkenned, majestical, secure — 

Where the old, brown, friendly river shaped 

Like Tigris shore for shore ! Haply a Ghoul 

Sat in the churchyard under a frightened moon, 

A thighbone in his fist, and glared 

At supper with a Lady : she who took 

Her rice with tweezers grain by grain. 



72 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 

Or you might stumble — there by the iron gates 

Of the Pump Room — underneath the limes — 

Upon Bedreddin in his shirt and drawers, 

Just as the civil Genie laid him down. 

Or those red-curtained panes, 

Whence a tame cornet tenored it throatily 

Of beer-pots and spittoons and new long pipes, 

Might turn a caravansery's, wherein 

You found Noureddin Ali, loftily drunk, 

And that fair Persian, bathed in tears. 

You 'd not have given away 

For all the diamonds in the Vale Perilous 

You had that dark and disleaved afternoon 

Escaped on a roc's claw. 

Disguised like Sindbad — but in Christmas beef ! 

And all the blissful while 

The schoolboy satchel at your hip 

Was such a bulse of gems as should amaze 

Grey-whiskered chapmen drawn 

From over Caspian : yea, the Chief Jewellers 

Of Tartary and the bazaars. 

Seething with traffic, of enormous Ind. 

Thus cried, thus called aloud, to the child heart 
The magian East : thus the child eyes 



ENTERTAINMENTS 73 

Spelled out the wizard message by the light 

Of the sober, workaday hours 

They saw, week in week out, pass, and still pass 

In the sleepy Minster City, folded kind 

In ancient Severn's arm, 

Amongst her water-meadows and her docks, 

Whose floating populace of ships — 

Galliots and luggers, light-heeled brigantines. 

Bluff barques and rake -hell fore -and -afters — 

brought 
To her very doorsteps and geraniums 
The scents of the World's End ; the calls 
That may not be gainsaid to rise and ride 
Like fire on some high errand of the race ; 
The irresistible appeals 
For comradeship that sound 
Steadily from the irresistible sea. 
Thus the East laughed and whispered, and the tale, 
Telling itself anew 
In terms of living, labouring life. 
Took on the colours, busked it in the wear 
Of life that lived and laboured ; and Romance, 
The Angel-Playmate, raining down 
His golden influences 
On all I saw, and all I dreamed and did. 



74 ARABIAN NIGHTS' 

Walked with me arm in arm, 

Or left me, as one bediademed with straws 

And bits of glass, to gladden at my heart 

Who had the gift to seek and feel and find 

His fiery-hearted presence everywhere. 

Even so dear Hesper, bringer of all good things, 

Sends the same silver dews 

Of happiness down her dim, delighted skies 

On some poor collier-hamlet — (mound on mound 

Of sifted squalor ; here a soot-throated stalk 

Sullenly smoking over a row 

Of flat-faced hovels ; black in the gritty air 

A web of rails and wheels and beams ; with strings 

Of hurtling, tipping trams) — 

As on the amorous nightingales 

And roses of Shiraz, or the walls and towers 

Of Samarcand — the Ineffable — whence you espy 

The splendour of Ginnistan's embattled spears. 

Like listed lightnings. 

Samarcand ! 
That name of names ! That star-vaned belvedere 
Builded against the Chambers of the South ! 
That outpost on the Infinite ! 

And behold ! 
Questing therefrom, you knew not what wild tide 



ENTERTAINMENTS 75 

Might overtake you : for one fringe, 

One suburb, is stablished on firm earth ; but one 

Floats founded vague 

In lubberlands delectable — isles of palm 

And lotus, fortunate mains, far-shimmering seas, 

The promise of wistful hills — 

The shining, shifting Sovranties of Dream. 



BRIC-A-BRAC 



1877-ii 



Ihe tune of the time.'' — Hamlet, concerning OsRic 



BALLADE 
OF A TOYOKUNI COLOUR-PRINT 

ro w. A. 

Was I a Samurai renowned, 
Two-sworded, fierce, immense of bow ? 
A histrion angular and profound ? 
A priest ? a porter ? — Child, although 
I have forgotten clean, I know 
That in the shade of Fujisan, 
What time the cherry-orchards blow, 
I loved you once in old Japan. 

As here you loiter, flowing-gowned 

And hugely sashed, with pins a-row 

Your quaint head as with flamelets crowned, 

Demure, inviting — even so. 

When merry maids in Miyako 

To feel the sweet o* the year began, 

And green gardens to overflow, 

I loved you once in old Japan. 

79 



8o BRIC-A-BRAC 

Clear shine the hills ; the rice-fields round 
Two cranes are circling ; sleepy and slow, 
A blue canal the lake's blue bound 
Breaks at the bamboo bridge ; and lo ! 
Touched with the sundown's spirit and glow, 
I see you turn, with flirted fan, 
Against the plum-tree's bloomy snow. . . . 
I loved you once in old Japan ! 

Envoy 

Dear, 'twas a dozen lives ago ; 
But that I was a lucky man 
The Toyokuni here will show : 
I loved you — once — in old Japan. 



BRIC-A-BRAC 8i 

BALLADE 

(double refrain) 
OF YOUTH AND AGE 

I. M. 

Thomas Edward Brown 
(1829-1896) 

Spring at her height on a morn at prime, 
Sails that laugh from a flying squall, 
Pomp of harmony, rapture of rhyme — 
Youth is the sign of them, one and all. 
Winter sunsets and leaves that fall, 
An empty flagon, a folded page, 
A tumble-down wheel, a tattered ball — 
These are a type of the world of Age. 

Bells that clash in a gaudy chime, 

Swords that clatter in onsets tall. 

The words that ring and the fames that climb — 

Youth is the sign of them, one and all. 

Hymnals old in a dusty stall, 

A bald, blind bird in a crazy cage, 

The scene of a faded festival — 

These are a type of the world of Age. 



82 BRIC-A-BRAC 

Hours that strut as the heirs of time, 
Deeds whose rumour's a clarion-call, 
Songs where the singers their souls sublime- 
Youth is the sign of them, one and all. 
A staff that rests in a nook of wall, 
A reeling battle, a rusted gage, 
The chant of a nearing funeral — 
These are a type of the world of Age. 

Envoy 

Struggle and turmoil, revel and brawl — 
Youth is the sign of them, one and all. 
A smouldering hearth and a silent stage — 
These are a type of the world of Age. 



BRIC-A-BRAC 83 

BALLADE 

(double refrain) 
OF MIDSUMMER DAYS AND NIGHTS 

ro w. H. 

With a ripple of leaves and a tinkle of streams 
The full world rolls in a rhythm of praise, 
And the winds are one with the clouds and beams- 
Midsummer days ! Midsummer days ! 
The dusk grows vast ; in a purple haze, 
While the West from a rapture of sunset rights, 
Faint stars their exquisite lamps upraise — 
Midsummer nights ! O midsummer nights ! 

The wood's green heart is a nest of dreams, 
The lush grass thickens and springs and sways, 
The rathe wheat rustles, the landscape gleams — 
Midsummer days ! Midsummer days ! 
In the stilly fields, in the stilly ways, 
All secret shadows and mystic lights. 
Late lovers murmur and linger and gaze — 
Midsummer nights ! O midsummer nights ! 



84 BRIC-A-BRAC 

There 's a music of bells from the trampling teams, 
Wild skylarks hover, the gorses blaze, 
The rich, ripe rose as with incense steams — 
Midsummer days ! Midsummer days ! 
A soul from the honeysuckle strays, 
And the nightingale as from prophet heights 
Sings to the Earth of her million Mays — 
Midsummer nights 1 O midsummer nights ! 

Envoy 

And it's O, for my dear and the charm that 

stays — 
Midsummer days ! Midsummer days ! 
It 's O, for my Love and the dark that plights — 
Midsummer nights ! O midsummer nights ! 



BRIC-A-BRAC 85 

BALLADE 
OF DEAD ACTORS 

I. M. 

Edward John Henley 
(1861-1898) 

Where are the passions they essayed, 
And where the tears they made to flow ? 
Where the wild humours they portrayed 
For laughing worlds to see and know ? 
Othello's wrath and Juliet's woe ? 
Sir Peter's whims and Timon's gall ? 
And Millamant and Romeo ? 
Into the night go one and all. 

Where are the braveries, fresh or frayed ? 
The plumes, the armours — friend and foe ? 
The cloth of gold, the rare brocade. 
The mantles glittering to and fro ? 
The pomp, the pride, the royal show ? 
The cries of war and festival ? 
The youth, the grace, the charm, the glow ? 
Into the night go one and all. 



86 BRIC-A-BRAC 

The curtain falls, the play is played : 
The Beggar packs beside the Beau ; 
The Monarch troops, and troops the Maid ; 
The Thunder huddles with the Snow. 
Where are the revellers high and low ? 
The clashing swords ? The lover's call ? 
The dancers gleaming row on row ? 
Into the night go one and all. 

Envoy 

Prince, in one common overthrow 
The Hero tumbles with the Thrall : 
As dust that drives, as straws that blow, 
Into the night go one and all. 



BRIC-A-BRAC 87 



BALLADE 

MADE IN THE HOT WEATHER 

To C. M. 

Fountains that frisk and sprinkle 
The moss they overspill ; 
Pools that the breezes crinkle ; 
The wheel beside the mill, 
With its wet, weedy frill ; 
Wind-shadows in the wheat ; 
A water-cart in the street ; 
The fringe of foam that girds 
An islet's ferneries ; 
A green sky's minor thirds — 
To live, I think of these ! 

Of ice and glass the tinkle, 
Pellucid, silver-shrill ; 
Peaches without a wrinkle ; 
Cherries and snow at will, 
From china bowls that fill 
The senses with a sweet 



88 BRIC-A-BRAC 

Incuriousness of heat ; 
A melon's dripping sherds ; 
Cream-clotted strawberries ; 
Dusk dairies set with curds — 
To live, I think of these ! 

Vale-lily and periwinkle ; 

Wet stone-crop on the sill ; 

The look of leaves a-twinkle 

With windlets clear and still ; 

The feel of a forest rill 

That wimples fresh and fleet 

About one's naked feet ; 

The muzzles of drinking herds ; 

Lush flags and bulrushes ; 

The chirp of rain-bound birds — 

To live, I think of these ! 



Envoy 

Dark aisles, new packs of cards, 
Mermaidens' tails, cool swards, 
Dawn dews and starlit seas. 
White marbles, whiter words — 
To live, I think of these ! 



BRIC-A-BRAC 89 



BALLADE OF TRUISMS 

Gold or silver, every day, 

Dies to gray. 
There are knots in every skein. 
Hours of work and hours of play 

Fade away 
Into one immense Inane. 
Shadow and substance, chaiF and grain. 

Are as vain 
As the foam or as the spray. 
Life goes crooning, faint and fain, 

One refrain: — 
* If it could be always May ! * 

Though the earth be green and gay, 
Though, they say, 

Man the cup of heaven may drain ; 

Though, his little world to sway. 
He display 

Hoard on hoard of pith and brain : 

Autumn brings a mist and rain 
That constrain 



90 BRIC-A-BRAC 

Him and his to know decay, 

Where undimmed the lights that wane 

Would remain. 
If it could be always May. 

Tea, alas, must turn to Nay, 

Flesh to clay. 
Chance and Time are ever twain. 
Men may scoff, and men may pray, 

But they pay 
Every pleasure with a pain. 
Life may soar, and Fortune deign 

To explain 
Where her prizes hide and stay ; 
But we lack the lusty train 

We should gain, 
If it could be always May. 

Envoy 

Time, the pedagogue, his cane 
Might retain, 

But his charges all would stray 

Truanting in every lane — 

Jack with Jane — 

If it could be always May. 



BRIC-A-BRAC 91 



DOUBLE BALLADE 

OF LIFE AND FATE 

Fools may pine, and sots may swill, 
Cynics gibe, and prophets rail, 
Moralists may scourge and drill, 
Preachers prose, and fainthearts quail. 
Let them whine, or threat, or wail ! 
Till the touch of Circumstance 
Down to darkness sink the scale. 
Fate 's a fiddler. Life 's a dance. 

What if skies be wan and chill ? 
What if winds be harsh and stale ? 
Presently the east will thrill. 
And the sad and shrunken sail, 
Bellying with a kindly gale, 
Bear you sunwards, while your chance 
Sends you back the hopeful hail : — 
* Fate 's a fiddler, Life *s a dance.' 



92 BRIC-A-BRAC 

Idle shot or coming bill, 
Hapless love or broken bail, 
Gulp it (never chew your pill !), 
And, if Burgundy should fail, 
Try the humbler pot of ale ! 
Over all is heaven's expanse. 
Gold's to find among the shale. 
Fate 's a fiddler, Life 's a dance. 



Dull Sir Joskin sleeps his fill, 
Good Sir Galahad seeks the Grail, 
Proud Sir Pertinax flaunts his frill, 
Hard Sir JEgQV dints his mail ; 
And the while by hill and dale 
Tristram's braveries gleam and glance, 
And his blithe horn tells its tale : — 
* Fate 's a fiddler. Life 's a dance.' 



Araminta 's grand and shrill, 
Delia 's passionate and frail, 
Doris drives an earnest quill, 
Athanasia takes the veil : 
Wiser Phyllis o'er her pail. 
At the heart of all romance 



BRIC-A-BRAC 93 

Reading, sings to Strephon's flail : — 
* Fate *s a fiddler, Life *s a dance.' 



Every Jack must have his Jill 
(Even Johnson had his Thrale !) : 
Forward, couples — with a will ! 
This, the world, is not a jail. 
Hear the music, sprat and whale ! 
Hands across, retire, advance ! 
Though the doomsman's on your trail, 
Fate 's a fiddler. Life 's a dance. 

Envoy 

Boys and girls, at slug and snail 
And their kindred look askance. 
Pay your footing on the nail : 
Fate *s a fiddler. Life 's a dance. 



94 BRIC-A-BRAC 



DOUBLE BALLADE 
OF THE NOTHINGNESS OF THINGS 

The big teetotum twirls, 
And epochs wax and wane 
As chance subsides or swirls ; 
But of the loss and gain 
The sum is always plain. 
Read on the mighty pall, 
The weed of funeral 
That covers praise and blame, 
The -isms and the -anities, 
Magnificence and shame : — 
* O Vanity of Vanities ! * 

The Fates are subtile girls ! 
They give us chaff for grain. 
And Time, the Thunderer, hurls, 
Like bolted death, disdain 
At all that heart and brain 
Conceive, or great or small, 



BRIC-A-BRAC 95 

Upon this earthly ball. 
Would you be knight and dame ? 
Or woo the sweet humanities ? 
Or illustrate a name? 
O Vanity of Vanities ! 

We sound the sea for pearls, 
Or drown them in a drain ; 
We flute it with the merles, 
Or tug and sweat and strain ; 
We grovel, or we reign ; 
We saunter, or we brawl ; 
We answer, or we call ; 
We search the stars for Fame, 
Or sink her subterranities ; 
The legend's still the same : — 
* O Vanity of Vanities ! ' 

Here at the wine one birls. 
There some one clanks a chain. 
The flag that this man furls 
That man to float is fain. 
Pleasure gives place to pain : 
These in the kennel crawl. 



96 BRIC-A-BRAC 

While others take the wall. 
She has a glorious aim, 
He lives for the inanities. 
What comes of every claim ? 
O Vanity of Vanities ! 



Alike are clods and earls. 
For sot, and seer, and swain, 
For emperors and for churls, 
For antidote and bane. 
There is but one refrain : 
But one for king and thrall, 
For David and for Saul, 
For fleet of foot and lame. 
For pieties and profanities, 
The picture and the frame : — 
* O Vanity of Vanities ! * 

Life is a smoke that curls — 

Curls in a flickering skein. 

That winds and whisks and whirls, 

A figment thin and vain, 

Into the vast Inane. 

One end for hut and hall ! 



BRIC-A-BRAC 97 

One end for cell and stall ! 
Burned in one common flame 
Are wisdoms and insanities. 
For this alone we came : — 
' O Vanity of Vanities ! ' 

Envoy 

Prince, pride must have a fall. 
What is the worth of all 
Your state's supreme urbanities ? 
Bad at the best's the game. 
Well might the Sage exclaim : — 
* O Vanity of Vanities ! ' 



98 BRIC-A-BRAC 



AT QUEENSFERRY 

to W. G. S. 

The blackbird sang, the skies were clear and clean 
We bowled along a road that curved a spine 
Superbly sinuous and serpentine 
Thro' silent symphonies of summer green. 
Sudden the Forth came on us — sad of mien, 
No cloud to colour it, no breeze to line : 
A sheet of dark, dull glass, without a sign 
Of life or death, two spits of sand between. 
Water and sky merged blank in mist together, 
The Fort loomed spectral, and the Guardship's spars 
Traced vague, black shadows on the shimmery 

glaze : 
We felt the dim, strange years, the grey, strange 

weather. 
The still, strange land, unvexed of sun or stars, 
Where Lancelot rides clanking thro' the haze. 



BRIC-A-BRAC 99 



ORIENrjLE 

She 's an enchanting little Israelite, 

A world of hidden dimples ! — Dusky-eyed, 

A starry-glancing daughter of the Bride, 

With hair escaped from some Arabian Night, 

Her lip is red, her cheek is golden-white. 

Her nose a scimitar ; and, set aside 

The bamboo hat she cocks with so much pride, 

Her dress a dream of daintiness and delight. 

And when she passes with the dreadful boys 

And romping girls, the cockneys loud and crude, 

My thought, to the Minories tied yet moved to 

range 
The Land o' the Sun, commingles with the noise 
Of magian drums and scents of sandalwood 
A touch Sidonian — modern — taking — strange ! 



L.cfC. 



100 BRIC-A-BRAC 



IN FISHERROW 

A HARD north-easter fifty winters long 
Has bronzed and shrivelled sere her face and neck ; 
Her locks are wild and grey, her teeth a wreck ; 
Her foot is vast, her bowed leg spare and strong. 
A wide blue cloak, a squat and sturdy throng 
Of curt blue coats, a mutch without a speck, 
A white vest broidered black, her person deck. 
Nor seems their picked, stern, old-world quaint- 

ness wrong. 
Her great creel forehead-slung, she wanders nigh. 
Easing the heavy strap with gnarled, brown fingers, 
The spirit of traffic watchful in her eye, 
Ever and anon imploring you to buy. 
As looking down the street she onward lingers, 
Reproachful, with a strange and doleful cry. 



BRIC-A-BRAC 



lOI 



BACK-VIEW 
To D. F. 

I WATCHED you saunter down the sand : 
Serene and large, the golden weather 
Flowed radiant round your peacock feather, 
And glistered from your jewelled hand. 
Your tawny hair, turned strand on strand 
And bound with blue ribands together, 
Streaked the rough tartan, green like heather. 
That round your lissome shoulder spanned. 
Your grace was quick my sense to seize : 
The quaint looped hat, the twisted tresses, 
The close-drawn scarf, and under these 
The flowing, flapping draperies — 
My thought an outline still caresses, 
Enchanting, comic, Japanese ! 



102 BRIC-A-BRAC 



CRO^IS 

To G. W. 

The beach was crowded. Pausing now and then, 

He groped and fiddled doggedly along, 

His worn face glaring on the thoughtless throng 

The stony peevishness of sightless men. 

He seemed scarce older than his clothes. Again, 

Grotesquing thinly many an old sweet song, 

So cracked his fiddle, his hand so frail and wrong, 

You hardly could distinguish one in ten. 

He stopped at last, and sat him on the sand, 

And, grasping wearily his bread-winner, 

Stared dim towards the blue immensity, 

Then leaned his head upon his poor old hand. 

He may have slept : he did not speak nor stir : 

His gesture spoke a vast despondency. 



BRIC-A-BRAC 103 



ATTADALE WEST HIGHLANDS 

ro A. J. 

A BLACK and glassy float, opaque and still, 
The loch, at furthest ebb supine in sleep. 
Reversing, mirrored in its luminous deep 
The calm grey skies ; the solemn spurs of hill ; 
Heather, and corn, and wisps of loitering haze ; 
The wee white cots, black-hatted, plumed with 

smoke ; 
The braes beyond — and when the ripple awoke, 
They wavered with the jarred and wavering glaze. 
The air was hushed and dreamy. Evermore 
A noise of running water whispered near. 
A straggling crow called high and thin. A bird 
Trilled from the birch-leaves. Round the shingled 

shore, 
Yellow with weed, there wandered, vague and clear. 
Strange vowels, mysterious gutturals, idly heard. 



104 BRIC-A-BRAC 



FROM A WINDOW IN PRINCES STREET 

<ro M. M. M^B. 

Above the Crags that fade and gloom 
Starts the bare knee of Arthur's Seat ; 
Ridged high against the evening bloom, 
The Old Town rises, street on street ; 
With lamps bejewelled, straight ahead, 
Like rampired walls the houses lean, 
All spired and domed and turreted, 
Sheer to the valley's darkling green ; 
Ranged in mysterious disarray. 
The Castle, menacing and austere. 
Looms through the lingering last of day ; 
And in the silver dusk you hear. 
Reverberated from crag and scar. 
Bold bugles blowing points of war. 



BRIC-A-BRAC 105 



IN THE DIALS 

To Garryowen upon an organ ground 
Two girls are jigging. Riotously they trip, 
With eyes aflame, quick bosoms, hand on hip, 
As in the tumult of a witches' round. 
Youngsters and youngsters round them prance and 

bound. 
Two solemn babes twirl ponderously, and skip. 
The artist's teeth gleam from his bearded lip. 
High from the kennel howls a tortured hound. 
The music reels and hurtles, and the night 
Is full of stinks and cries ; a naphtha-light 
Flares from a barrow ; battered and obtused 
With vices, wrinkles, life and work and rags, 
Each with her inch of clay, two loitering hags 
Look on dispassionate — critical — something 'mused. 



io6 BRIC-A-BRAC 



The gods are dead? Perhaps they are ! Who 

knows ? 
Living at least in Lempriere undeleted, 
The wise, the fair, the awful, the jocose, 
Are one and all, I like to think, retreated 
In some still land of lilacs and the rose. 

Once high they sat, and high o'er earthly shows 
With sacrificial dance and song were greeted. 
Once . . . long ago. But now, the story goes. 

The gods are dead. 

It must be true. The world, a world of prose. 
Full-crammed with facts, in science swathed and 

sheeted. 
Nods in a stertorous after-dinner doze ! 
Plangent and sad, in every wind that blows 
Who will may hear the sorry words repeated : — 
* The Gods are Dead ! * 



BRIC-A-BRAC 107 



To F. W. 

Let us be drunk, and for a while forget, 

Forget, and, ceasing even from regret, 

Live without reason and despite of rhyme, 

As in a dream preposterous and sublime. 

Where place and hour and means for once are met. 

Where is the use of effort ? Love and debt 

And disappointment have us in a net. 

Let us break out, and taste the morning prime . . . 

Let us be drunk. 

In vain our little hour we strut and fret, 
And mouth our wretched parts as for a bet : 
We cannot please the tragicaster Time. 
To gain the crystal sphere, the silver clime, 
Where Sympathy sits dimpling on us yet, 
Let us be drunk ! 



io8 BRIC-A-BRAC 



When you are old, and I am passed away — 
Passed, and your face, your golden face, is gray — 
I think, whatever the end, this dream of mine. 
Comforting you, a friendly star will shine 
Down the dim slope where still you stumble and 
stray. 

So may it be : that so dead Yesterday, 
No sad-eyed ghost but generous and gay. 
May serve you memories like almighty wine, 
When you are old ! 

Dear Heart, it shall be so. Under the sway 

Of death the past's enormous disarray 

Lies hushed and dark. Yet though there come no 

sign, 
Live on well pleased : immortal and divine 
Love shall still tend you, as God's angels may, 
When you are old. 



BRIC-A-BRAC 109 



Beside the idle summer sea 
And in the vacant summer days, 
Light Love came fluting down the ways, 
Where you were loitering with me. 

Who has not welcomed, even as we. 
That jocund minstrel and his lays 
Beside the idle summer sea 
And in the vacant summer days ? 

We listened, we were fancy-free ; 
And lo ! in terror and amaze 
We stood alone — alone at gaze 
With an implacable memory 
Beside the idle summer sea. 



no BRIC-A-BRAC 



I. M. 

R. G. C. B. 

1878 

The ways of Death are soothing and serene, 
And all the words of Death are grave and sweet. 
From camp and church, the fireside and the street. 
She beckons forth — and strife and song have been. 

A summer night descending cool and green 
And dark on daytime's dust and stress and heat. 
The ways of Death are soothing and serene. 
And all the words of Death are grave and sweet 

O glad and sorrowful, with triumphant mien 

And radiant faces look upon, and greet 

This last of all your lovers, and to meet 

Her kiss, the Comforter's, your spirit lean. . . » 

The ways of Death are soothing and serene. 



BRIC-A-BRAC III 



We shall surely die : 
Must we needs grow old ? 
Grow old and cold, 
And we know not why ? 

O, the By-and-By, 
And the tale that 's told ! 
We shall surely die : 
Must we needs grow old ? 

Grow old and sigh, 
Grudge and withhold, 
Resent and scold ? . . . 
Not you and I ? 
We shall surely die ! 



112 BRIC-A-BRAC 



What is to come we know not. But we know 
That what has been was good — was good to show, 
Better to hide, and best of all to bear. 
We are the masters of the days that were: 
We have lived, we have loved, wc have suffered 
. . . even so. 

Shall we not take the ebb who had the flow ? 
Life was our friend. Now, if it be our foe — 
Dear, though it spoil and break us ! — need we care 

What is to come ? 

Let the great winds their worst and wildest blow. 
Or the gold weather round us mellow slow : 
We have fulfilled ourselves, and we can dare 
And we can conquer, though we may not share 
In the rich quiet of the afterglow 

What is to come. 



ECHOES 



1872-1889 



Aqui estd encerrada el alma del licenciado Pedro Gardas. 
Gil Blas AU LECTEUR. 



TO MY MOTHER 

Chiming a dream by the way 

With ocean's rapture and roar, 
I met a maiden to-day 

Walking alone on the shore : 
Walking in maiden wise, 

Modest and kind and fair, 
The freshness of spring in her eyes 

And the fulness of spring in her hair. 

Cloud-shadow and scudding sun-burst 

Were swift on the floor of the sea, 
And a mad wind was romping its worst, 

But what was their magic to me ? 
Or the charm of the midsummer skies ? 

I only saw she was there, 
A dream of the sea in her eyes 

And the kiss of the sea in her hair, 



ii6 ECHOES 

I watched her vanish in space ; 

She came where I walked no more ; 
But something had passed of her grace 

To the spell of the wave and the shore 
And now, as the glad stars rise, 

She comes to me, rosy and rare. 
The delight of the wind in her eyes 

And the hand of the wind in her hair. 



1872 



ECHOES 117 



II 

Life is bitter. All the faces of the years, 
Young and old, are gray with travail and with 
tears. 
Must we only wake to toil, to tire, to weep ? 
In the sun, among the leaves, upon the flowers, 
Slumber stills to dreamy death the heavy hours . . . 
Let me sleep. 

Riches won but mock the old, unable years ; 
Fame *s a pearl that hides beneath a sea of tears ; 

Love must wither, or must live alone and weep. 
In the sunshine, through the leaves, across the 

flowers, 
While we slumber, death approaches through the 
hours ... 

Let me sleep. 

1872 



ii8 ECHOES 



III 



O, GATHER me the rose, the rose, 
While yet in flower we find it. 

For summer smiles, but summer goes, 
And winter waits behind it ! 

For with the dream foregone, foregone, 

The deed forborne for ever. 
The worm, regret, will canker on, 

And Time will turn him never. 

So well it were to love, my love, 

And cheat of any laughter 
The fate beneath us and above, 

The dark before and after. 

The myrtle and the rose, the rose. 
The sunshine and the swallow, 

The dream that comes, the wish that goes. 
The memories that follow ! 

1874 



ECHOES 119 

IV 

I. M. 

R. T. HAMILTON BRUCE 

(1846-1899) 

Out of the night that covers me, 
Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 

I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul. 

In the fell clutch of circumstance 
I have not winced nor cried aloud. 

Under the bludgeonings of chance 
My head is bloody, but unbowed. 

Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
Looms but the Horror of the shade, 

And yet the menace of the years 
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. 

It matters not how strait the gate. 

How charged with punishments the scroll, 

I am the master of my fate : 

I am the captain of my soul. 

1875 



120 ECHOES 



I AM the Reaper. 

All things with heedful hook 

Silent I gather. 

Pale roses touched with the spring, 

Tall corn in summer, 

Fruits rich with autumn, and frail winter 

blossoms — 
Reaping, still reaping — 
All things with heedful hook 
Timely I gather. 

I am the Sower. 
All the unbodied life 
Runs through my seed-sheet. 
Atom with atom wed. 
Each quickening the other, 
Fall through my hands, ever changing, still 
changeless. 



ECHOES 121 

Ceaselessly sowing, 
Life, incorruptible life, 
Flows from my seed-sheet. 

Maker and breaker, 

I am the ebb and the flood, 

Here and Hereafter. 

Sped through the tangle and coil 

Of infinite nature, 

Viewless and soundless I fashion all being. 

Taker and giver, 

I am the womb and the grave. 

The Now and the Ever. 

1875 



122 ECHOES 



VI 

Praise the generous gods for giving 
In a world of wrath and strife, 

With a little time for living, 
Unto all the joy of life. 

At whatever source we drink it, 

Art or love or faith or wine, 
In whatever terms we think it, 

It is common and divine. 

Praise the high gods, for in giving 

This to man, and this alone. 
They have made his chance of living 

Shine the equal of their own. 

1875 



ECHOES 123 



VII 

Fill a glass with golden wine, 

And the while youi' lips are wet 
Set their perfume unto mine, 

And forget, 
Every kiss we take and give 
Leaves us less of life to live. 

Yet again ! Your whim and mine 

In a happy while have met. 
All your sweets to me resign. 

Nor regret 
That we press with every breath, 
Sighed or singing, nearer death. 



187s 



124 ECHOES 



VIII 

We'll go no more a-roving by the light of the 

moon. 
November glooms are barren beside the dusk of 

June. 
The summer flowers are faded, the summer thoughts 

are sere. 
We'll go no more a-roving, lest worse befall, my 

dear. 

We'll go no more a-roving by the light of the 

moon. 
The song we sang rings hollow, and heavy runs 

the tune. 
Glad ways and words remembered would shame 

the wretched year. 
We'll go no more a-roving, nor dream we did, 

my dear. 



ECHOES 125 

We'll go no more a-roving by the light of the 

moon. 
If yet we walk together, we need not shun the 

noon. 
No sweet thing left to savour, no sad thing left to 

fear, 
We '11 go no more a-roving, but weep at home, my 

dear. 

1875 



126 ECHOES 

IX 

To W. R. 

Madam Life's a piece in bloom 
Death goes dogging everywhere : 

She 's the tenant of the room, 
He 's the ruffian on the stair. 

You shall see her as a friend, 

You shall bilk him once and twice ; 

But he '11 trap you in the end, 
And he '11 stick you for her price. 

With his kneebones at your chest, 
And his knuckles in your throat. 

You would reason — plead — protest ! 
Clutching at her petticoat ; 

But she 's heard it all before, 

Well she knows you 've had your fiin, 

Gingerly she gains the door, 
And your little job is done. 

.877 



ECHOES 127 



The sea Is full of wandering foam, 

The sky of driving cloud ; 
My restless thoughts among them roam . . . 

The night is dark and loud. 

Where are the hours that came to me 

So beautiful and bright ? 
A wild wind shakes the wilder sea . . . 

O, dark and loud 's the night ! 

1876 



128 ECHOES 



XI 

ro w. R. 

Thick is the darkness — 
Sunward, O, sunward ! 

Rough is the highway — 
Onward, still onward \ 

Dawn harbours surely 
East of the shadows. 

Facing us somewhere 

Spread the sweet meadows. 

Upward and forward ! 

Time will restore us : 
Light is above us, 

Rest is before us. 



1876 



ECHOES 129 



XII 



To me at my fifth-floor window 
The chimney-pots in rows 

Are sets of pipes pandean 
For every wind that blows ; 

And the smoke that whirls and eddies 
In a thousand times and keys 

Is really a visible music 
Set to my reveries. 

O monstrous pipes, melodious 
With fitful tune and dream, 

The clouds are your only audience, 
Her thought is your only theme ! 



875 



130 ECHOES 



XIII 



Bring her again, O western wind, 

Over the western sea : 
Gentle and good and fair and kind, 

Bring her again to me ! 

Not that her fancy holds me dear, 
Not that a hope may be : 

Only that I may know her near. 
Wind of the western sea. 



1875 



ECHOES 131 



XIV 



The wan sun westers, faint and slow ; 
The eastern distance glimmers gray ; 
An eerie haze comes creeping low 
Across the little, lonely bay ; 
And from the sky-line far away 
About the quiet heaven are spread 
Mysterious hints of dying day. 
Thin, delicate dreams of green and red. 

And weak, reluctant surges lap 

And rustle round and down the strand. 

No other sound ... If it should hap, 

The ship that sails from fairy-land ! 

The silken shrouds with spells are manned, 

The hull is magically scrolled. 

The squat mast lives, and in the sand 

The gold prow-griffin claws a hold. 



132 ECHOES 

It steals to seaward silently ; 
Strange fish-folk follow thro* the gloom ; 
Great wings flap overhead ; I see 
The Castle of the Drowsy Doom 
Vague thro* the changeless twilight loom, 
Enchanted, hushed. And ever there 
She slumbers in eternal bloom, 
Her cushions hid with golden hair. 

1875 



ECHOES 133 



XV 



There is a wheel inside my head 

Of wantonness and wine. 

An old, cracked fiddle is begging without, 
But the wind with scents of the sea is fed, 

And the sun seems glad to shine. 

The sun and the wind are akin to you, 

As you are akin to June. 

But the fiddle ! ... It giggles and twitters about, 
And, love and laughter ! who gave him the cue ? — 

He 's playing your favourite tune. 

1875 



134 ECHOES 



XVI 

While the west is paling 

Starshine is begun. 
While the dusk is failing 

Glimmers up the sun. 

So, till darkness cover 
Life's retreating gleam, 

Lover follows lover, 

Dream succeeds to dream. 

Stoop to my endeavour, 

O my love, and be 
Only and for ever 

Sun and stars to me. 



1876 



ECHOES 135 



XVII 



The sands are alive with sunshine, 
The bathers lounge and throng, 

And out in the bay a bugle 
Is lilting a gallant song. 

The clouds go racing eastward, 

The blithe wind cannot rest. 
And a shard on the shingle flashes 

Like the shining soul of a jest ; 

While children romp in the surges, 

And sweethearts wander free. 
And the Firth as with laughter dimples . , 

I would it were deep over me ! 

1875 



136 ECHOES 



XVIII 

ro A. D. 

The nightingale has a lyre of gold, 

The lark*s is a clarion call. 
And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute, 

But I love him best of all. 

For his song is all of the joy of life, 
And we in the mad, spring weather, 

We two have listened till he sang 
Our hearts and lips together. 

1876 



ECHOES 137 



XIX 

Your heart has trembled to my tongue, 

Your hands in mine have lain, 
Your thought to me has leaned and clung, 
Again and yet again, 

My dear, 
Again and yet again. 

Now die the dream, or come the wife, 

The past is not in vain, 
For wholly as it was your life 
Can never be again, 

My dear. 
Can never be again. 

1876 



138 ECHOES 



XX 



The surges gushed and sounded, 
The blue was the blue of June, 

And low above the brightening east 
Floated a shred of moon. 

The woods were black and solemn, 
The night winds large and free, 

And in your thought a blessing seemed 
To fall on land and sea. 

1877 



ECHOES . 139 



xxr 

We flash across the level. 

We thunder thro* the bridges. 
We bicker down the cuttings. 

We sway along the ridges. 

A rush of streaming hedges, 
Of jostling lights and shadows, 

Of hurtling, hurrying stations. 
Of racing woods and meadows. 

We charge the tunnels headlong — 
The blackness roars and shatters. 

We crash between embankments — 
The open spins and scatters. 

We shake off the miles like water, 
We might carry a royal ransom ; 

And I think of her waiting, waiting, 
And long for a common hansom. 

1876 



140 ECHOES 



XXII 



The West a glimmering lake of light, 

A dream of pearly weather, 
The first of stars is burning white — 

The star we watch together. 
Is April dead ? The unresting year 

Will shape us our September, 
And April's work is done, my dear — 

Do you not remember ? 

O gracious eve ! O happy star. 

Still-flashing, glowing, sinking ! — 
Who lives of lovers near or far 

So glad as I in thinking ? 
The gallant world is warm and green, 

For May fulfils November. 
When lights and leaves and loves have been, 

Sweet, will you remember ? 



ECHOES 141 

O star benignant and serene, 

I take the good to-morrow, 
That fills from verge to verge my dream, 

With all its joy and sorrow ! 
The old, sweet spell is unforgot 

That turns to June December ; 
And, tho' the world remembered not. 

Love, we would remember. 

1876 



142 ECHOES 



XXIII 

The skies are strown with stars, 
The streets are fresh with dew, 
A thin moon drifts to westward, 
The night is hushed and cheerful : 
My thought is quick with you. 

Near windows gleam and laugh, 

And far away a train 
Clanks glowing through the stillness : 
A great content 's in all things, 

And life is not in vain. 

1877 



ECHOES 143 



XXIV 

The full sea rolls and thunders 

In glory and in glee. 
O, bury me not in the senseless earth 

But in the living sea ! 

Ay, bury me where it surges 
A thousand miles from shore, 

And in its brotherly unrest 
I '11 range for evermore. 



1876 



144 ECHOES 



XXV 

In the year that 's come and gone, love, his flying 

feather 
Stooping slowly, gave us heart, and bade us walk 

together. 
In the year that 's coming on, though many a troth 

be broken. 
We at least will not forget aught that love hath 

spoken. 

In the year that 's come and gone, dear, we wove 

a tether 
All of gracious words and thoughts, binding two 

together. 
In the year that 's coming on with its wealth of 

roses 
We shall weave it stronger yet, ere the circle 

closes. 



ECHOES 145 

In the year that 's come and gone, in the golden 

weather, 
Sweet, my sweet, we swore to keep the watch of 

life together. 
In the year that 's coming on, rich in joy and 

sorrow, 
We shall light our lamp, and wait life's mysterious 

morrow. 

1877 



146 ECHOES 



XXVI 

In the placid summer midnight, 

Under the drowsy sky, 
I seem to hear in the stillness 

The moths go glimmering by. 

One by one from the windows 
The lights have all been sped. 

Never a blind looks conscious — 
The street is asleep in bed ! 

But I come where a living casement 
Laughs luminous and wide ; 

I hear the song of a piano 
Break in a sparkling tide ; 

And I feel, in the waltz that frolics 
And warbles swift and clear, 

A sudden sense of shelter 

And friendliness and cheer . . . 



ECHOES 

A sense of tinkling glasses. 

Of love and laughter and light — 

The piano stops, and the window 
Stares blank out into the night. 

The blind goes out, and I wander 
To the old, unfriendly sea, 

The lonelier for the memory 

That walks like a ghost with me. 



H7 



148 ECHOES 



XXVI 



She sauntered by the swinging seas, 

A jewel glittered at her ear, 
And, teasing her along, the breeze 

Brought many a rounded grace more near. 

So passing, one with wave and beam, 

She left for memory to caress 
A laughing thought, a golden gleam, 

A hint of hidden loveliness. 

1876 



ECHOES 149 



XXVIII 

To S. C. 

Blithe dreams arise to greet us, 

And life feels clean and new, 
For the old love comes to meet us 

In the dawning and the dew. 
Overblown with sunny shadows, 

O'er sped with winds at play. 
The woodlands and the meadows 

Are keeping holiday. 
Wild foals are scampering, neighing, 

Brave merles their hautboys blow : 
Come ! let us go a-maying 

As in the Long-Ago. 

Here we but peak and dwindle : 
The clank of chain and crane. 

The whir of crank and spindle 
Bewilder heart and brain ; 



ISO ECHOES 

The ends of our endeavour 

Are merely wealth and fame, 
Yet in the still Forever 

We Ve one and all the same ; 
Delaying, still delaying, 

We watch the fading west : 
Come ! let us go a-maying. 

Nor fear to take the best. 

Yet beautiful and spacious 

The wise, old world appears. 
Yet frank and fair and gracious 

Outlaugh the jocund years. 
Our arguments disputing, 

The universal Pan 
Still wanders fluting — fluting — 

Fluting to maid and man. 
Our weary well-a-waying 

His music cannot still : 
Come ! let us go a-maying. 

And pipe with him our fill. 

Where wanton winds are flowing 
Among the gladdening grass ; 



ECHOES 151 

Where hawthorn brakes are blowing, 

And meadow perfumes pass ; 
Where morning's grace is greenest, 

And fullest noon's of pride ; 
Where sunset spreads serenest, 

And sacred night 's most wide ; 
Where nests are swaying, swaying, 

And spring's fresh voices call. 
Come ! let us go a-maying, 

And bless the God of all ! 

1878 



152 ECHOES 



XXIX 

To R. L. S. 

A CHILD, 

Curious and innocent, 

Slips from his Nurse, and rejoicing 

Loses himself in the Fair. 

Thro' the jostle and din 
Wandering, he revels. 
Dreaming, desiring, possessing ; 
Till, of a sudden 
Tired and afraid, he beholds 
The sordid assemblage 
Just as it is ; and he runs 
With a sob to his Nurse 
(Lighting at last on him), 
And in her motherly bosom 
Cries him to sleep. 



ECHOES 153 

Thus thro' the World, 

Seeing and feeling and knowing, 

Goes Man : till at last. 

Tired of experience, he turns 

To the friendly and comforting breast 

Of the old nurse, Death. 

1876 



m 



154 ECHOES 



XXX 

Kate-a-Whimsies, John-a-Dreams, 

Still debating, still delay, 
And the world *s a ghost that gleams — 

Wavers — vanishes away ! 

We must live while live we can ; 

We should love while love we may. 
Dread in women, doubt in man . . . 

So the Infinite runs away. 

1876 



ECHOES 155 



xxx: 



O, HAVE you blessed, behind the stars, 

The blue sheen in the skies, 
When June the roses round her calls ? — 
Then do you know the light that falls 

From her beloved eyes. 

And have you felt the sense of peace 
That morning meadows give ? — 

Then do you know the spirit of grace, 

The angel abiding in her face. 
Who makes it good to live. 

She shines before me, hope and dream, 

So fair, so still, so wise, 
That, winning her, I seem to win 
Out of the dust and drive and din 

A nook of Paradise. 

1877 



156 ECHOES 



XXXII 

To D. H. 

O, Falmouth is a fine town with ships in the bay, 
And I wish from my heart it 's there I was to-day ; 
I wish from my heart I was far away from here, 
Sitting in my parlour and talking to my dear. 

For it's home, dearie, home — it's home I want 
to be. 

Our topsails are hoisted, and we '11 away to sea. 

O, the oak and the ash and the bonnie birken 
tree 

They 're all growing green in the old countrie. 

In Baltimore a-walking a lady I did meet 

With her babe on her arm, as she came down the 

street ; 
And I thought how I sailed, and the cradle standing 

ready 
For the pretty little babe that has never seen its 

daddie. 
And it 's home, dearie, home . . . 



ECHOES 157 

O, if it be a lass, she shall wear a golden ring ; 
And if it be a lad, he shall fight for his king : 
With his dirk and his hat and his little jacket blue 
He shall walk the quarter-deck as his daddie used 
to do. 
And it 's home, dearie, home . . , 

O, there 's a wind a-blowing, a-blowing from the 

west, 
And that of all the winds is the one I like the best, 
For it blows at our backs, and it shakes our pennon 

free, 
And it soon will blow us home to the old countrie. 
For it's home, dearie, home — it's home I want 

to be. 
Our topsails are hoisted, and we '11 away to sea. 
O, the oak and the ash and the bonnie birken 

tree 
They 're all growing green in the old countrie. 

1878 

Note. — ^The burthen and the third stanza are old. 



158 ECHOES 



XXXIII 



The ways are green with the gladdening sheen 

Of the young year's fairest daughter. 
O, the shadows that fleet o'er the springing wheat ! 

O, the magic of running water ! 
The spirit of spring is in every thing, 

The banners of spring are streaming, 
We march to a tune from the fifes of June, 

And life 's a dream worth dreaming. 

It 's all very well to sit and spell 

At the lesson there 's no gainsaying ; 
But what the deuce are wont and use 

When the whole mad world's a-maying ? 
When the meadow glows, and the orchard snows, 

And the air 's with love-motes teeming, 
When fancies break, and the senses wake, 

O, life 's a dream worth dreaming ! 



ECHOES 159 

What Nature has writ with her lusty wit 

Is worded so wisely and kindly 
That whoever has dipped in her manuscript 

Must up and follow her blindly. 
Now the summer prime is her blithest rhyme 

In the being and the seeming, 
And they that have heard the overword 

Know life 's a dream worth dreaming. 

1878 



i6o ECHOES 

XXXIV 

To K. DE M. 

Love blows as the lulnd bloivs, 

Love blows into the heart. — Nile Boat-Soho. 

Life in her creaking shoes 
Goes, and more formal grows, 
A round of calls and cues : 
Love blows as the wind blows. 
Blows ! ... in the quiet close 
As in the roaring mart. 
By ways no mortal knows 
Love blows into the heart. 

The stars some cadence use, 

Forthright the river flows, 

In order fall the dews. 

Love blows as the wind blows : 

Blows ! . . . and what reckoning shows 

The courses of his chart } 

A spirit that comes and goes, 

Love blows into the heart. 

1878 



ECHOES i6i 



XXXV 
I. M. 

MARGARITA SORORI 

(1886) 

A LATE lark twitters from the quiet skies ; 

And from the west, 

Where the sun, his day's work ended, 

Lingers as in content. 

There falls on the old, grey city 

An influence luminous and serene, 

A shining peace. 

The smoke ascends 

In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires 
Shine, and are changed. In the valley 
Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun, 
Closing his benediction. 



i62 ECHOES 

Sinks, and the darkening air 
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night- 
Night with her train of stars 
And her great gift of sleep. 

So be my passing 1 

My task accomplished and the long day done, 

My wages taken, and in my heart 

Some late lark singing, 

Let me be gathered to the quiet west. 

The sundown splendid and serene, 

Death. 

1876 



ECHOES 163 



XXXVI 

I GAVE my heart to a woman — 
I gave it her, branch and root. 

She bruised, she wrung, she tortured, 
She cast it under foot. 

Under her feet she cast it, 
She trampled it where it fell. 

She broke it all to pieces. 
And each was a clot of hell. 

There in the rain and the sunshine 
They lay and smouldered long ; 

And each, when again she viewed them, 
Had turned to a living song. 



i64 ECHOES 



XXXVII 

to W. A. 

Or ever the knightly years were gone 
With the old world to the grave, 

I was a King in Babylon 

And you were a Christian Slave. 

I saw, I took, I cast you by, 
I bent and broke your pride. 

You loved me well, or I heard them lie, 
But your longing was denied. 

Surely I knew that by and by 
You cursed your gods and died. 

And a myriad suns have set and shone 

Since then upon the grave 
Decreed by the King in Babylon 

To her that had been his Slave. 

The pride I trampled is now my scathe, 
For it tramples me again. 



ECHOES 165 

The old resentment lasts like death, 
For you love, yet you refrain. 

I break my heart on your hard unfaith, 
And I break my heart in vain. 

Yet not for an hour do I wish undone 

The deed beyond the grave, 
When I was a King in Babylon 

And you were a Virgin Slave. 



1 66 ECHOES 



xxxvii: 



On the way to Kew, 

By the river old and gray, 

Where in the Long Ago 

We laughed and loitered so, 

I met a ghost to-day, 

A ghost that told of you — 

A ghost of low replies 

And sweet, inscrutable eyes 

Coming up from Richmond 

As you used to do. 

By the river old and gray, 
The enchanted Long Ago 
Murmured and smiled anew. 
On the way to Kew, 
March had the laugh of May, 
The bare boughs looked aglow, 
And old, immortal words 
Sang in my breast like birds, 
Coming up from Richmond 
As I used with you. 



ECHOES 167 



With the life of Long Ago 
Lived my thought of you. 
By the river old and gray 
Flowing his appointed way 
As I watched I knew 
What is so good to know — 
Not in vain, not in vain, 
Shall I look for you again 
Coming up from Richmond 
On the way to Kew. 



i68 ECHOES 



XXXIX 

The Past was goodly once, and yet, when all is 

said. 
The best of it we know is that it 's done and dead. 

Dwindled and faded quite, perished beyond recall, 
Nothing is left at last of what one time was all. 

Coming back like a ghost, staring and lingering on, 
Never a word it speaks but proves it dead and gone. 

Duty and work and joy — these things it cannot 

give; 
And the Present is life, and life is good to live. 

Let it lie where it fell, far from the living sun, 
The Past that, goodly once, is gone and dead and 
done. 



ECHOES 169 



XL 

The spring, my dear, 
Is no longer spring. 
Does the blackbird sing 
What he sang last year ? 
Are the skies the old 
Immemorial blue ? 
Or am I, or are you, 
Grown cold ? 

Though life be change, 
It is hard to bear 
When the old sweet air 
Sounds forced and strange. 
To be out of tune, 
Plain You and I . . . 
It were better to die. 
And soon ! 



I70 ECHOES 



XLI 

ro R. A. M. S. 

the Spirit of Wine 
Sang in my glass ^ and I listened 
With love to his odorous musicy 
His /lushed and magnificent song, 

* I am health, I am heart, I am life ! 



For I give for the asking 

The fire of my father, the Sun, 

And the strength of my mother, the Earth. 

Inspiration in essence, 

I am wisdom and wit to the wise^ 

His visible muse to the poet. 

The soul of desire to the lover, 

The genius of laughter to all. 

* Come, lean on me, ye that are weary ! 
Rise, ye faint-hearted and doubting ! 
Haste, ye that lag by the way ! 
I am Pride, the consoler ; 



ECHOES 171 

Valour and Hope are my henchmen ; 
I am the Angel of Rest. 

* I am life, I am wealth, I am fame : 
For I captain an army 
Of shining and generous dreams ; 
And mine, too, all mine, are the keys 
Of that secret spiritual shrine, 
Where, his work-a-day soul put by, 
Shut in with his saint of saints — 
With his radiant and conquering self — 
Man worships, and talks, and is glad. 



Come, sit with me, ye that are lonely, 

Ye that are paid with disdain. 

Ye that are chained and would soar ! 

I am beauty and love ; 

I am friendship, the comforter ; 

I am that which forgives and forgets.'- 



^he Spirit of Wine 
Sang in my heart, and I triumphed 
In the savour and scent of his musicy 
His magnetic and mastering song. 



172 ECHOES 



XLI 



A WINK from Hesper, falling 

Fast in the wintry sky, 
Comes through the even blue, 
Dear, like a word from you . . . 

Is it good-bye ? 

Across the miles between us 

I send you sigh for sigh. 
Good-night, sweet friend, good-night 
Till life and all take flight, 

Never good-bye. 



ECHOES 173 



XLIII 

Friends . . old friends 
One sees how it ends. 
A woman looks 
Or a man tells lies, 
And the pleasant brooks 
And the quiet skies, 
Ruined with brawling 
And caterwauling. 
Enchant no more 
As they did before. 
And so it ends 
With friends. 

Friends . . old friends . 
And what if it ends ? 
Shall we dare to shirk 
What we live to learn ? 
It has done its work. 
It has served its turn ; 
And, forgive and forget 
Or hanker and fret. 



174 ECHOES 

We can be no more 
As we were before. 
When it ends, it ends 
With friends. 

Friends . . old friends . 
So it breaks, so it ends. 
There let it rest ! 
It has fought and won. 
And is still the best 
That either has done. 
Each as he stands 
The work of its hands, 
Which shall be more 
As he was before ? . . . 
What is it ends 
With friends ^ 



ECHOES 175 



XLIV 

If it should come to be, 
This proof of you and me, 

This type and sign 
Of hours that smiled and shone, 
And yet seemed dead and gone 

As old-world wine : 

Of Them Within the Gate 
Ask we no richer fate, 

No boon above. 
For girl child or for boy, 
My gift of life and joy, 

Your gift of love. 



A^:, 



176 ECHOES 



XLV 

ro w. B. 

From the brake the Nightingale 

Sings exulting to the Rose ; 
Though he sees her waxing pale 

In her passionate repose, 
While she triumphs waxing frail, 

Fading even while she glows ; 
Though he knows 
How it goes — 
Knows of last year's Nightingale 

Dead with last year's Rose. 

Wise the enamoured Nightingale, 
Wise the well-beloved Rose ! 

Love and life shall still prevail. 
Nor the silence at the close 

Break the magic of the tale 

In the telling, though it shows — 



ECHOES ,77 



Who but knows 
How it goes ! — 
Life a last year's Nightingale, 
Love a last year's Rose. 



M 



178 ECHOES 



XLVI 

MATRI DILECTISSIMiE 

I. M. 

In the waste hour 

Between to-day and yesterday 

We watched, while on my arm — 

Living flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone — 

Dabbled in sweat the sacred head 

Lay uncomplaining, still, contemptuous, strange; 

Till the dear face turned dead. 

And to a sound of lamentation 

The good, heroic soul with all its wealth — 

Its sixty years of love and sacrifice, 

Suffering and passionate faith — was reabsorbed 

In the inexorable Peace, 

And life was changed to us for evermore. 

Was nothing left of her but tears 
Like blood-drops from the heart ? 



ECHOES 179 

Nought save remorse 

For duty unfulfilled, justice undone, 

And charity ignored ? Nothing but love. 

Forgiveness, reconcilement, where in truth, 

But for this passing 

Into the unimaginable abyss 

These things had never been? 

Nay, there were we, 

Her five strong sons ! 

To her Death came — the great Deliverer came ! — 

As equal comes to equal, throne to throne. 

She was a mother of men. 

The stars shine as of old. The unchanging River, 

Bent on his errand of immortal law, 

Works his appointed way 

To the immemorial sea. 

And the brave truth comes overwhelmingly home: — 

That she in us yet works and shines. 

Lives and fulfils herself. 

Unending as the river and the stars. 

Dearest, live on 

In such an immortality 



i8o ECHOES 

As we thy sons, 

Born of thy body and nursed 

At those wild, faithful breasts, 

Can give — of generous thoughts, 

And honourable words, and deeds 

That make men half in love with fate ! 

Live on, O brave and true. 

In us thy children, in ours whose life is thine — 

Our best and theirs ! What is that best but thee — 

Thee, and thy gift to us, to pass 

Like light along the infinite of space 

To the immitigable end ? 

Between the river and the stars, 

O royal and radiant soul. 

Thou dost return, thine influences return 

Upon thy children as in life, and death 

Turns stingless ! What is Death 

But Life in act ? How should the Unteeming Grave 

Be victor over thee. 

Mother, a mother of men ? 



ECHOES i8i 



XLVII 

Crosses and troubles a-many have proved me. 
One or two women (God bless them !) have loved 

me. 
I have worked and dreamed, and I Ve talked at will. 
Of art and drink I have had my fill. 
I Ve comforted here, and I Ve succoured there. 
I Ve faced my foes, and I Ve backed my friends. 
I Ve blundered, and sometimes made amends. 
I have prayed for light, and I Ve known despair. 
Now I look before, as I look behind. 
Come storm, come shine, whatever befall. 
With a grateful heart and a constant mind, 
For the end I know is the best of all. 

1888-1889 



LONDON 
VOLUNTARIES 

{To Charles Whibley) 



1890-1892 



Grave 

St. Margaret's bells, 

Quiring their innocent, old-world canticles. 

Sing in the storied air, 

All rosy-and-golden, as with memories 

Of woods at evensong, and sands and seas 

Disconsolate for that the night is nigh. 

O, the low, lingering lights ! The large last gleam 

(Hark ! how those brazen choristers cry and call !) 

Touching these solemn ancientries, and there, 

The silent River ranging tide-mark high 

And the callow, grey-faced Hospital, 

With the strange glimmer and glamour of a 

dream ! 
The Sabbath peace is in the slumbrous trees. 
And from the wistful, the fast-widowing sky 
(Hark ! how those plangent comforters call and 

cry!) 

Falls as in August plots late roseleaves fall. 

The sober Sabbath stir — 

us 



r86 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 

Leisurely voices, desultory feet ! — 
Comes from the dry, dust-coloured street, 
Where in their summer frocks the girls go by, 
And sweethearts lean and loiter and confer, 
Just as they did an hundred years ago, 
Just as an hundred years to come they will : — 
When you and I, Dear Love, lie lost and low. 
And sweet-throats none our welkin shall fulfil. 
Nor any sunset fade serene and slow ; 
But, being dead, we shall not grieve to die. 



LONDON VOLUNTARIES 187 



II 

Andante con moto 

Forth from the dust and din, 

The crush, the heat, the many-spotted glare, 

The odour and sense of life and lust aflare. 

The wrangle and jangle of unrests, 

Let us take horse, Dear Heart, take horse and 

win — 
As from swart August to the green lap of May — 
To quietness and the fresh and fragrant breasts 
Of the still, delicious night, not yet aware 
In any of her innumerable nests 
Of that first sudden plash of dawn, 
Clear, sapphirine, luminous, large, 
Which tells that soon the flowing springs of day 
In deep and ever deeper eddies drawn 
Forward and up, in wider and wider way, 
Shall float the sands, and brim the shores, 



i88 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 

On this our lith of the World, as round it roars 
And spins into the outlook of the Sun 
(The Lord's first gift, the Lord's especial charge), 
With light, with living light, from marge to 

marge 
Until the course He set and staked be run. 

Through street and square, through square and 

street. 
Each with his home-grown quality of dark 
And violated silence, loud and fleet. 
Waylaid by a merry ghost at every lamp. 
The hansom wheels and plunges. Hark, O, hark, 
Sweet, how the old mare*s bit and chain 
Ring back a rough refrain 
Upon the marked and cheerful tramp 
Of her four shoes ! Here is the Park, 
And O, the languid midsummer wafts adust, 
The tired midsummer blooms ! 
O, the mysterious distances, the glooms 
Romantic, the august 
And solemn shapes ! At night this City of 

Trees 
Turns to a tryst of vague and strange 
And monstrous Majesties, 



LONDON VOLUNTARIES 189 

Let loose from some dim underworld to range 

These terrene vistas till their twilight sets : 

When, dispossessed of wonderfulness, they stand 

Beggared and common, plain to all the land 

For stooks of leaves ! And lo ! the Wizard Hour, 

His siknt, shining sorcery winged with power ! 

Still, still the streets, between their carcanets 

Of linking gold, are avenues of sleep. 

But see how gable ends and parapets 

In gradual beauty and significance 

Emerge ! And did you hear 

That little twitter-and-cheep. 

Breaking inordinately loud and clear 

On this still, spectral, exquisite atmosphere ? 

*Tis a first nest at matins ! And behold 

A rakehell cat — how furtive and acold ! 

A spent witch homing from some infamous 

dance — 
Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade 
Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade ! 
And now ! a little wind and shy, 
The smell of ships (that earnest of romance), 
A sense of space and water, and thereby 
A lamplit bridge ouching the troubled sky, 
And look, O, look ! a tangle of silver gleams 



190 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 

And dusky lights, our River and all his dreams, 
His dreams that never save in our deaths can die. 



What miracle is happening in the air, 

Charging the very texture of the gray 

With something luminous and rare ? 

The night goes out like an ill-parcelled fire, 

And, as one lights a candle, it is day. 

The extinguisher, that perks it like a spire 

On the little formal church, is not yet green 

Across the water : but the house-tops nigher. 

The corner-lines, the chimneys — look how clean. 

How new, how naked ! See the batch of boats, 

Here at the stairs, washed in the fresh-sprung 

beam ! 
And those are barges that were goblin floats, 
Black, hag-steered, fraught with devilry and 

dream ! 
And in the piles the water frolics clear, 
The ripples into loose rings wander and flee. 
And we — we can behold that could but hear 
The ancient River singing as he goes, 
New-mailed in morning, to the ancient Sea. 
The gas burns lank and jaded in its glass : 
The old Ruffian soon shall yawn himself awake, 



LONDON VOLUNTARIES 191 

And light his pipe, and shoulder his tools, 

and take 
His hobnailed way to work ! 

Let us too pass — 
Pass ere the sun leaps and your shadow shows — 
Through these long, blindfold rows 
Of casements staring blind to right and left, 
Each with his gaze turned inward on some piece 
Of life in death's own likeness — Life bereft 
Of living looks as by the Great Release — 
Pass to an exquisite night's more exquisite close ! 

Reach upon reach of burial — so they feel. 
These colonies of dreams ! And as we steal 
Homeward together, but for the buxom breeze, 
Fitfully frolicking to heel 
With news of dawn-drenched woods and tumbling 

seas. 
We might — thus awed, thus lonely that we are — 
Be wandering some dispeopled star, 
Some world of memories and unbroken graves. 
So broods the abounding Silence near and far : 
Till even your footfall craves 
Forgiveness of the majesty it braves. 



192 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 



III 

Scherzxindo 

Down through the ancient Strand 

The spirit of October, mild and boon 

And sauntering, takes his way 

This golden end of afternoon. 

As though the corn stood yellow in all the land, 

And the ripe apples dropped to the harvest-moon. 

Lo ! the round sun, half-down the western slope- 
Seen as along an unglazed telescope — 
Lingers and lolls, loth to be done with day : 
Gifting the long, lean, lanky street 
And its abounding confluences of being 
With aspects generous and bland ; 
Making a thousand harnesses to shine 
As with new ore from some enchanted mine, 
And every horse's coat so full of sheen 



LONDON VOLUNTARIES 193 

He looks new-tailored, and every 'bus feels clean, 

And never a hansom but is worth the feeing ; 

And every jeweller within the pale 

Offers a real Arabian Night for sale ; 

And even the roar 

Of the strong streams of toil, that pause and pour 

Eastward and westward, sounds suffused — 

Seems as it were bemused 

And blurred, and like the speech 

Of lazy seas on a lotus-haunted beach — 

With this enchanted lustrousness. 

This mellow magic, that (as a man's caress 

Brings back to some faded face, beloved before, 

A heavenly shadow of the grace it wore 

Ere the poor eyes were minded to beseech) 

Old things transfigures, and you hail and bless 

Their looks of long-lapsed loveliness once more : 

Till Clement's, angular and cold and staid. 

Gleams forth in glamour's very stuffs arrayed ; 

And Bride's, her aery, unsubstantial charm 

Through flight on flight of springing, soaring stone 

Grown flushed and warm. 

Laughs into life full-mooded and fresh-blown ; 

And the high majesty of Paul's 

Uplifts a voice of living light, and calls — 

N 



194 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 

Calls to his millions to behold and see 
How goodly this his London Town can be ! 

For earth and sky and air 

Are golden everywhere, 

And golden with a gold so suave and fine 

The looking on it lifts the heart like wine. 

Trafalgar Square 

(The fountains volleying golden glaze) 

Shines like an angel-market. High aloft 

Over his couchant Lions, in a haze 

Shimmering and bland and soft, 

A dust of chrysoprase, 

Our Sailor takes the golden gaze 

Of the saluting sun, and flames superb, 

As once he flamed it on his ocean round. 

The dingy dreariness of the picture-place, 

Turned very nearly bright, 

Takes on a luminous transiency of grace, 

And shows no more a scandal to the ground. 

The very blind man pottering on the kerb. 

Among the posies and the ostrich feathers 

And the rude voices touched with all the weathers 

Of the long, varying year, 

Shares in the universal alms of light. 



LONDON VOLUNTARIES 195 

The windows, with their fleeting, flickering fires, 

The height and spread of frontage shining sheer. 

The quiring signs, the rejoicing roofs and spires — 

*Tis El Dorado — El Dorado plain. 

The Golden City ! And when a girl goes by, 

Look ! as she turns her glancing head, 

A call of gold is floated from her ear ! 

Golden, all golden ! In a golden glory, 

Long-lapsing down a golden coasted sky, 

The day, not dies but, seems 

Dispersed in wafts and drifts of gold, and shed 

Upon a past of golden song and story 

And memories of gold and golden dreams. 



196 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 



IV 



Largo i Tuesto 

Out of the poisonous East, 

Over a continent of blight, 

Like a maleficent Influence released 

From the most squalid cellarage of hell. 

The Wind-Fiend, the abominable — 

The Hangman Wind that tortures temper and light — 

Comes slouching, sullen and obscene, 

Hard on the skirts of the embittered night ; 

And in a cloud unclean 

Of excremental humours, roused to strife 

By the operation of some ruinous change, 

Wherever his evil mandate run and range, 

Into a dire intensity of life, 

A craftsman at his bench, he settles down 

To the grim job of throttling London Town. 

So, by a jealous lightlessness beset 

That might have oppressed the dragons of old time 



LONDON VOLUNTARIES 197 

Crunching and groping in the abysmal slime, 

A cave of cut-throat thoughts and villainous dreams, 

Hag-rid and crying with cold and dirt and wet, 

The afflicted City, prone from mark to mark 

In shameful occultation, seems 

A nightmare labyrinthine, dim and drifting, 

With wavering gulfs and antic heights, and shifting, 

Rent in the stuff of a material dark. 

Wherein the lamplight, scattered and sick and pale, 

Shows like the leper's living blotch of bale : 

Uncoiling monstrous into street on street 

Paven with perils, teeming with mischance, 

Where man and beast go blindfold and in dread. 

Working with oaths and threats and faltering feet 

Somewhither in the hideousness ahead ; 

Working through wicked airs and deadly dews 

That make the laden robber grin askance 

At the good places in his black romance. 

And the poor, loitering harlot rather choose 

Go pinched and pined to bed 

Than lurk and shiver and curse her wretched way 

From arch to arch, scouting some threepenny prey. 

Forgot his dawns and far-flushed afterglows, 
His green garlands and windy eyots forgot. 



198 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 

The old Father-River flows, 

His watchfires cores of menace in the gloonij 

As he came oozing from the Pit, and bore, 

Sunk in his filthily transfigured sides, 

Shoals of dishonoured dead to tumble and rot 

In the squalor of the universal shore : 

His voices sounding through the gruesome air 

As from the Ferry where the Boat of Doom 

With her blaspheming cargo reels and rides : 

The while his children, the brave ships, 

No more adventurous and fair. 

Nor tripping it light of heel as home-bound 

brides, 
But infamously enchanted. 
Huddle together in the foul eclipse, 
Or feel their course by inches desperately. 
As through a tangle of alleys murder-haunted. 
From sinister reach to reach out — out — to sea. 

And Death the while — 

Death with his well-worn, lean, professional smile, 

Death in his threadbare working trim — 

Comes to your bedside, unannounced and bland. 

And with expert, inevitable hand 

Feels at your windpipe, fingers you in the lung, 



LONDON VOLUNTARIES 199 

Or flicks the clot well into the labouring heart : 

Thus signifying unto old and young, 

However hard of mouth or wild of whim, 

'Tis time — 'tis time by his ancient watch — to part 

From books and women and talk and drink and 

art. 
And you go humbly after him 
To a mean suburban lodging : on the way 
To what or where 

Not Death, who is old and very wise, can say : 
And you — how should you care 
So long as, unreclaimed of hell. 
The Wind-Fiend, the insufferable, 
Thus vicious and thus patient, sits him down 
To the black job of burking London Town? 



200 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 



Allegro maestoso 

Spring winds that blow 

As over leagues of myrtle-blooms and may ; 

Bevies of spring clouds trooping slow, 

Like matrons heavy bosomed and aglow 

With the mild and placid pride of increase ! Nay, 

What makes this insolent and comely stream 

Of appetence, this freshet of desire 

(Milk from the wild breasts of the wilful Day !), 

Down Piccadilly dance and murmur and gleam 

In genial wave on wave and gyre on gyre ? 

Why does that nymph unparalleled splash and 

churn 
The wealth of her enchanted urn 
Till, over-billowing all between 
Her cheerful margents, grey and living green, 
It floats and wanders, glittering and fleeing, 
An estuary of the joy of being ? 
Why should the lovely leafage of the Park 
Touch to an ecstasy the act of seeing ? 



LONDON VOLUNTARIES 201 

— Sure, sure my paramour, my Bride of Brides, 

Lingering and flushed, mysteriously abides 

In some dim, eye-proof angle of odorous dark, 

Some smiling nook of green-and-golden shade. 

In the divine conviction robed and crowned 

The globe fulfils his immemorial round 

But as the marrying-place of all things made ! 

There is no man, this deifying day, 

But feels the primal blessing in his blood. 

There is no woman but disdains — 

The sacred impulse of the May 

Brightening like sex made sunshine through her 

veins — 
To vail the ensigns of her womanhood. 
None but, rejoicing, flaunts them as she goes, 
Bounteous in looks of her delicious best. 
On her inviolable quest : 
These with their hopes, with their sweet secrets 

those, 
But all desirable and frankly fair, 
As each were keeping some most prosperous tryst, 
And in the knowledge went imparadised ! 
For look ! a magical influence everywhere, 
Look how the liberal and transfiguring air 



202 LONDON VOLUNTARIES 

Washes this inn of memorable meetings, 

This centre of ravishments and gracious greetings, 

Till, through its jocund loveliness of length 

A tidal-race of lust from shore to shore, 

A brimming reach of beauty met with strength, 

It shines and sounds like some miraculous dream, 

Some vision multitudinous and agleam, 

Of happiness as it shall be evermore ! 

Praise God for giving 

Through this His messenger among the days 

His word the life He gave is thrice-worth living ! 

For Pan, the bountiful, imperious Pan — 

Not dead, not dead, as impotent dreamers feigned, 

But the gay genius of a million Mays 

Renewing his beneficent endeavour ! — 

Still reigns and triumphs, as he hath triumphed and 

reigned 
Since in the dim blue dawn of time 
The universal ebb-and-flow began. 
To sound his ancient music, and prevails, 
By the persuasion of his mighty rhyme, 
Here in this radiant and immortal street 
Lavishly and omnipotently as ever 
In the open hills, the undissembling dales, 



LONDON VOLUNTARIES 203 

The laughing-places of the juvenile earth. 
For lo ! the wills of man and woman meet, 
Meet and are moved, each unto each endeared, 
As once in Eden's prodigal bowers befell, 
To share his shameless, elemental mirth 
In one great act of faith : while deep and strong, 
Incomparably nerved and cheered. 
The enormous heart of London joys to beat 
To the measures of his rough, majestic song ; 
The lewd, perennial, overmastering spell 
That keeps the rolling universe ensphered, 
And life, and all for which life lives to long, 
Wanton and wondrous and for ever well. 



RHYMES 
AND RHYTHMS 



1889-1892 



PROLOGUE 

Something is dead . . . 
I^he grace of sunset solitudes ^ the march 
Of the solitary moon^ the pomp and power 
Of round on round of shining soldier-stars 
Patrolling space, the bounties of the sun — 
Sovran, tremendous, unimaginable — 
l^he multitudinous friendliness of the sea^ 
Possess no more — no more. 

Something is dead . . . 

T^he Autumn rain-rot deeper and wider soaks 

And spreads, the burden of Winter heavier weighs, 

His melancholy close and closer yet 

Cleaves, and those incantations of the Spring 

That made the heart a centre of miracles 

Grow formal, and the wonder-working hours 

Arise no more — no more. 

Something is dead . . . 

^Tis time to creep in close about the fire 

207 



2o8 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

And tell grey tales of what we were, and dream 
Old dreams and faded y and as we may rejoice 
In the young life that round us leaps and laughs^ 
A fountain in the sunshine ^ in the pride 
Of Gods best gift that to us twain returns^ 
Dear Hearty no more — no more. 



ro H. B. M. W. 

Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade 

On desolate sea and lonely sand, 
Out of the silence and the shade 

What is the voice of strange command 
Calling you still, as friend calls friend 

With love that cannot brook delay. 
To rise and follow the ways that wend 

Over the hills and far away ? 

Hark in the city, street on street 

A roaring reach of death and life, 
Of vortices that clash and fleet 

And ruin in appointed strife. 
Hark to it calling, calling clear, 

Calling until you cannot stay 
From dearer things than your own most dear 

Over the hills and far away. 



210 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

Out of the sound of the ebb-and-flow, 

Out of the sight of lamp and star, 
It calls you where the good winds blow^ 

And the unchanging meadows are : 
From faded hopes and hopes agleam, 

It calls you, calls you night and day 
Beyond the dark into the dream 

Over the hills and far away. 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 211 



II 



ro R. F. B. 

We are the Choice of the Will : God, when He 

gave the word 
That called us into line, set in our hand a sword ; 

Set us a sword to wield none else could lift and 

draw, 
And bade us forth to the sound of the trumpet of 

the Law. 

East and west and north, wherever the battle grew, 
As men to a feast we fared, the work of the Will 
to do. 

Bent upon vast beginnings, bidding anarchy cease — 
(Had we hacked it to the Pit, we had left it a 
place of peace !) — 

Marching, building, sailing, pillar of cloud or fire. 
Sons of the Will, we fought the fight of the Will, 
our sire. 



212 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

Road was never so rough that we left its purpose 

dark ; 
Stark was ever the sea, but our ships were yet more 

stark ; 

We tracked the winds of the world to the steps of 

their very thrones ; 
The secret parts of the world were salted with our 

bones : 



Till now the name of names, England, the name of 

might, 
Flames from the austral fires to the bounds of the 

boreal night ; 

And the call of her morning drum goes in a girdle 

of sound. 
Like the voice of the sun in song, the great globe 

round and round ; 

And the shadow of her flag, when it shouts to the 

mother-breeze. 
Floats from shore to shore of the universal 

seas ; 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 213 

And the loneliest death is fair with a memory of 

her flowers, 
And the end of the road to Hell with the sense of 

her dews and showers ! 

Who says that we shall pass, or the fame of us fade 

and die, 
While the living stars fulfil their round in the living 

sky? 

For the sire lives in his sons, and they pay their 

father's debt, 
And the Lion has left a whelp wherever his claw 

was set ; 

And the Lion in his whelps, his whelps that none 
shall brave. 

Is but less strong than Time and the great, all- 
whelming Grave. 



214 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 



III 

A DESOLATE shorc, 

The sinister seduction of the Moon, 

The menace of the irreclaimable Sea. 

Flaunting, tawdry and grim, 

From cloud to cloud along her beat, 

Leering her battered and inveterate leer, 

She signals where he prowls in the dark alone, 

Her horrible old man, 

Mumbling old oaths and warming 

His villainous old bones with villainous talk — 

The secrets of their grisly housekeeping 

Since they went out upon the pad 

In the first twilight of self-conscious Time : 

Growling, hideous and hoarse, 

Tales of unnumbered Ships, 

Goodly and strong. Companions of the Advance, 

In some vile alley of the night 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 215 

Waylaid and bludgeoned — 
Dead. 

Deep cellared in primeval ooze, 

Ruined, dishonoured, spoiled. 

They lie where the lean water-worm 

Crawls free of their secrets, and their broken sides 

Bulge with the slime of life. Thus they abide, 

Thus fouled and desecrate, 

The summons of the Trumpet, and the while 

These Twain, their murderers, 

Unravined, imperturbable, unsubdued. 

Hang at the heels of their children — She aloft 

As in the shining streets. 

He as in ambush at some accomplice door. 

The stalwart Ships, 

The beautiful and bold adventurers ! 

Stationed out yonder in the isle. 

The tall Policeman, 

Flashing his bull's-eye, as he peers 

About him in the ancient vacancy. 

Tells them this way is safety — this way home. 



2i6 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 



IV 



It came with the threat of a waning moon 

And the wail of an ebbing tide, 
But many a woman has lived for less, 

And many a man has died ; 
For life upon life took hold and passed, 

Strong in a fate set free. 
Out of the deep into the dark 

On for the years to be. 

Between the gleam of a waning moon 

And the song of an ebbing tide. 
Chance upon chance of love and death 

Took wing for the world so wide. 
O, leaf out of leaf is the way of the land, 

Wave out of wave of the sea 
And who shall reckon what lives may live 

In the life that we bade to be .? 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 217 



Why, my heart, do we love her so? 

(Geraldine, Geraldine !) 
Why does the great sea ebb and flow ? — 

Why does the round world spin ? 
Geraldine, Geraldine, 

Bid me my life renew : 
What is it worth unless I win, 

Love — love and you ? 

Why, my heart, when we speak her name 

(Geraldine, Geraldine !) 
Throbs the word like a flinging flame ? — 

Why does the Spring begin ? 
Geraldine, Geraldine, 

Bid me indeed to be : 
Open your heart, and take us in, 

Love — love and me. 



2i8 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 



VI 

•One with the ruined sunset, 
The strange forsaken sands, 

What is it waits, and wanders, 
And signs with desperate hands ? 

What is it calls in the twilight — 
Calls as its chance were vain ? 

The cry of a gull sent seaward 
Or the voice of an ancient pain ? 

The red ghost of the sunset. 
It walks them as its own, 

These dreary and desolate reaches . 
But O, that it walked alone ! 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 219 



VII 



There's a regret 

So grinding, so immitigably sad, 

Remorse thereby feels tolerant, even glad. . . . 

Do you not know it yet ? 

For deeds undone 

Rankle and snarl and hunger for their due, 
Till there seems naught so despicable as you 
In all the grin o* the sun. 

Like an old shoe 

The sea spurns and the land abhors, you lie 
About the beach of Time, till by and by 
Death, that derides you too — 

Death, as he goes 

His ragman's round, espies you, where you stray. 
With half-an-eye, and kicks you out of his way ; 
And then — and then, who knows 



220 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

But the kind Grave 

Turns on you, and you feel the convict Worm, 
In that black bridewell working out his term, 
Hanker and grope and crave ? 

* Poor fool that might — 

That might, yet would not, dared not, let this be, 
Think of it, here and thus made over to me 
In the implacable night ! * 

And writhing, fain 

And like a triumphing lover, he shall take 
His fill where no high memory lives to make 
His obscene victory vain. 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 221 



VIII 

to A. J. H. 

Time and the Earth — 

The old Father and Mother — 

Their teeming accomplished, 

Their purpose fulfilled, 

Close with a smile 

For a moment of kindness, 

Ere for the winter 

They settle to sleep. 

Failing yet gracious, 
Slow pacing, soon homing, 
A patriarch that strolls 
Through the tents of his children, 
The Sun, as he journeys 
His round on the lower 
Ascents of the blue. 
Washes the roofs 



222 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

And the hillsides with clarity ; 
Charms the dark pools 
Till they break into pictures ; 
Scatters magnificent 
Alms to the beggar trees ; 
Touches the mist-folk, 
That crowd to his escort, 
Into translucencies 
Radiant and ravishing : 
As with the visible 
Spirit of Summer 
Gloriously vaporised, 
Visioned in gold ! 

Love, though the fallen leaf 

Mark, and the fleeting light 

And the loud, loitering 

Footfall of darkness 

Sign to the heart 

Of the passage of destiny, 

Here is the ghost 

Of a summer that lived for us. 

Here is a promise 

Of summers to be. 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 



223 



IX 

* As like the Woman as you can ' — 

{^hus the New Adam was beguiled) — 

* So shall you touch the Perfect Man * — 

{God in the Garden heard and smiled), 

* Your father perished with his day : 

* A clot of passions fierce and blind, 

* He fought, he hacked, he crushed his way : 

' Your muscles, Child, must be of mind. 

* The Brute that lurks and irks within, 

' How, till you have him gagged and bound, 
' Escape the foullest form of Sin ? ' 

(God in the Garden laughed and frowned), 
' So vile, so rank, the bestial mood 

* In which the race is bid to be, 

* It wrecks the Rarer Womanhood : 

* Live, therefore, you, for Purity ! 



224 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

' Take for your mate no gallant croup, 

* No girl all grace and natural will : 

* To work her mission were to stoop, 

' Maybe to lapse, from Well to 111. 

* Choose one of whom your grosser make '- 

{God in the Garden laughed outright) — 

* The true refining touch may take, 

* Till both attain to Life's last height. 

' There, equal, purged of soul and sense. 

' Beneficent, high-thinking, just, 
' Beyond the appeal of Violence, 

' Incapable of common Lust, 
' In mental Marriage still prevail ' — 

{God in the Garden hid His face) — 

* Till you achieve that Female-Male 

* In Which shall culminate the race.* 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 225 



Midsummer midnight skies, 

Midsummer midnight influences and airs, 

The shining, sensitive silver of the sea 

Touched with the strange-hued blazonings of dawn ; 

And all so solemnly still I seem to hear 

The breathing of Life and Death, 

The secular Accomplices, 

Renewing the visible miracle of the world. 

The wistful stars 

Shine like good memories. The young morning 

wind 
Blows full of unforgotten hours 
As over a region of roses. Life and Death 
Sound on — sound on. . . . And the night magical, 
Troubled yet comforting, thrills 
As if the Enchanted Castle at the heart 
Of the wood's dark wonderment 
Swung wide his valves, and filled the dim sea-banks 
With exquisite visitants : 

P 



226 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

Words fiery-hearted yet, dreams and desires 
With living looks intolerable, regrets 
Whose voice comes as the voice of an only child 
Heard from the grave : shapes of a Might-Have- 

Been — 
Beautiful, miserable, distraught — 
The Law no man may baffle denied and slew. 

The spell-bound ships stand as at gaze 

To let the marvel by. The grey road glooms. . . . 

Glimmers . . . goes out . . . and there, O, there 

where it fades, 
What grace, what glamour, what wild will, 
Transfigure the shadows ? Whose, 
Heart of my heart, Soul of my soul, but yours ? 

Ghosts — ghosts — the sapphirine air 

Teems with them even to the gleaming ends 

Of the wild day-spring ! Ghosts, 

Everywhere — everywhere — till I and you 

At last — dear love, at last ! — 

Are in the dreaming, even as Life and Death, 

Twin-ministers of the unoriginal Will. 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 227 



XI 



Gulls in an aery morrice 

Gleam and vanish and gleam , . . 
The full sea, sleepily basking, 

Dreams under skies of dream. 

Gulls in an aery morrice 

Circle and swoop and close . . . 
Fuller and ever fuller 

The rose of the morning blows. 

Gulls, in an aery morrice 

Frolicking, float and fade . . . 

O, the way of a bird in the sunshine, 
The way of a man with a maid ! 



228 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 



XII 

Some starlit garden grey with dew, 
Some chamber flushed with wine and fire, 
What matters where, so I and you 
Are worthy our desire ? 

Behind, a past that scolds and jeers 
For ungirt loins and lamps unlit ; 
In front, the unmanageable years. 
The trap upon the Pit ; 

Think on the shame of dreams for deeds, 
The scandal of unnatural strife, 
The slur upon immortal needs. 
The treason done to life : 

Arise ! no more a living lie. 
And with me quicken and control 
Some memory that shall magnify 
The universal Soul. 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 229 



XIII 



To James McNeill Whistler 

Under a stagnant sky, 

Gloom out of gloom uncoiling into gloom, 

The River, jaded and forlorn. 

Welters and wanders wearily — wretchedly — on ; 

Yet in and out among the ribs 

Of the old skeleton bridge, as in the piles 

Of some dead lake-built city, full of skulls, 

Worm-worn, rat-riddled, mouldy with memories, 

Lingers to babble to a broken tune 

(Once, O, the unvoiced music of my heart !) 

So melancholy a soliloquy 

It sounds as it might tell 

The secret of the unending grief-in-grain, 

The terror of Time and Change and Death, 

That wastes this floating, transitory world. 

What of the incantation 

That forced the huddled shapes on yonder shore 



230 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

To take and wear the night 

Like a material majesty ? 

That touched the shafts of wavering fire 

About this miserable welter and wash — 

(River, O River of Journeys, River of Dreams !)- 

Into long, shining signals from the panes 

Of an enchanted pleasure-house, 

Where life and life might live life lost in life 

For ever and evermore ? 

O Death ! O Change ! O Time ! 
Without you, O, the insufferable eyes 
Of these poor Might-Have-Beens, 
These fatuous, ineffectual Yesterdays ! 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 231 



XIV 

to J. A. C 

Fresh from his fastnesses 

Wholesome and spacious, 

The North Wind, the mad huntsman, 

Halloas on his white hounds 

Over the grey, roaring 

Reaches and ridges, 

The forest of ocean, 

The chace of the world. 

Hark to the peal 

Of the pack in full cry. 

As he thongs them before him, 

Swarming voluminous. 

Weltering, wide-wallowing, 

Till in a ruining 

Chaos of energy, 



232 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

Hurled on their quarry, 
They crash into foam ! 

Old Indefatigable, 

Time's right-hand man, the sea 

Laughs as in joy 

From his millions of wrinkles : 

Laughs that his destiny, 

Great with the greatness 

Of triumphing order, 

Shows as a dwarf 

By the strength of his heart 

And the might of his hands. 

Master of masters, 
O maker of heroes, 
Thunder the brave, 
Irresistible message : — 
' Life is worth Living 
Through every grain of it, 
From the foundations 
To the last edge 
Of the cornerstone, death.' 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 233 



XV 

You played and sang a snatch of song, 

A song that ail-too well we knew ; 
But whither had flown the ancient wrong ; 

And was it really I and you ? 
O, since the end of life 's to live 

And pay in pence the common debt, 
What should it cost us to forgive 

Whose daily task is to forget ? 

You babbled in the well-known voice — 

Not new, not new the words you said. 
You touched me off that famous poise. 

That old effect, of neck and head. 
Dear, was it really you and I ? 

In truth the riddle 's ill to read, 
So many are the deaths we die 

Before we can be dead indeed. 



234 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 



XVI 



Space and dread and the dark — 

Over a livid stretch of sky 

Cloud-monsters crawling, like a funeral train 

Of huge, primeval presences 

Stooping beneath the weight 

Of some enormous, rudimentary grief ; 

While in the haunting loneliness 

The far sea waits and wanders with a sound 

As of the trailing skirts of Destiny, 

Passing unseen 

To some immitigable end 

With her grey henchman, Death. 

What larve, what spectre is this 
Thrilling the wilderness to life 
As with the bodily shape of Fear ? 
What but a desperate sense, 
A strong foreboding of those dim, 
Interminable continents, forlorn 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 235 

And many-silenced, in a dusk 

Inviolable utterly, and dead 

As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes 

In hugger-mugger through eternity ? 

Life — life — let there be life ! 

Better a thousand times the roaring hours 

When wave and wind, 

Like the Arch-Murderer in flight 

From the Avenger at his heel. 

Storm through the desolate fastnesses 

And wild waste places of the world ! 

Life — give me life until the end, 

That at the very top of being, 

The battle-spirit shouting in my blood. 

Out of the reddest hell of the fight 

I may be snatched and flung 

Into the everlasting lull. 

The immortal, incommunicable dream. 



236 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 



XVII 

CARMEN PAriBULARE 
To H. S. 

Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Crook 

And the rope of the Black Election, 
*Tis the faith of the Fool that a race you rule 

Can never achieve perfection : 
So ' It 's O, for the time of the new Sublime 

And the better than human way. 
When the Rat (poor beast) shall come to his own 

And the Wolf shall have his day ! * 

For Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Beam 

And the power of provocation. 
You have cockered the Brute with your dreadful 
fruit 

Till your thought is mere stupration : 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 237 

And ' It 's how should we rise to be pure and wise, 

And how can we choose but fall, 
So long as the Hangman makes us dread, 

And the Noose floats free for all ? * 

So Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Coign 

And the trick there 's no recalling. 
They will haggle and hew till they hack you through 

And at last they lay you sprawling : 
When * Hey ! for the hour of the race in flower 

And the long good-bye to sin ! ' 
And the fires of Hell gone out for the lack 

Of the fuel to keep them in ! ' 

But Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Bough 

And the ghastly Dreams that tend you. 
Your growth began with the life of Man, 

And only his death can end you. 
They may tug in line at your hempen twine, 

They may flourish with axe and saw ; 
But your taproot drinks of the Sacred Springs 

In the living rock of Law. 

And Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Fork, 
When the spent sun reels and blunders 



238 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

Down a welkin lit with the flare of the Pit 
As it seethes in spate and thunders, 

Stern on the glare of the tortured air 
Your lines august shall gloom, 

And your master-beam be the last thing whelmed 
In the ruining roar of Doom. 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 239 

XVIII 
I. M. 

MARGARET EMMA HENLEY 

(1888-1894) 

When you wake in your crib, 

You, an inch of experience — 

Vaulted about 

With the wonder of darkness ; 

Wailing and striving 

To reach from y©ur feebleness 

Something you feel 

Will be good to and cherish you, 

Something you know 

And can rest upon blindly : 

O, then a hand 

(Your mother's, your mother's !) 

By the fall of its fingers 

All knowledge, all power to you, 

Out of the dreary, 

Discouraging strangenesses 

Comes to and masters you, 



240 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

Takes you, and lovingly 
Woos you and soothes you 
Back, as you cling to it, 
Back to some comforting 
Corner of sleep. 

So you wake in your bed. 

Having lived, having loved ; 

But the shadows are there. 

And the world and its kingdoms 

Incredibly faded ; 

And you grope through the Terror 

Above you and under 

For the light, for the warmth, 

The assurance of life ; 

But the blasts are ice-born, 

And your heart is nigh burst 

With the weight of the gloom 

And the stress of your strangled 

And desperate endeavour : 

Sudden a hand — 

Mother, O Mother !— 

God at His best to you, 

Out of the roaring, 

Impossible silences, 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 241 

Falls on and urges you, 
Mightily, tenderly, 
Forth, as you clutch at it. 
Forth to the infinite 
Peace of the Grave. 

October 1891 



242 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 



XIX 
I. M. 

R. L. S. 

(1850-1894) 

O, Time and Change, they range and range 

From sunshine round to thunder ! — 
They glance and go as the great winds blow, 

And the best of our dreams drive under : 
For Time and Change estrange, estrange — 

And, now they have looked and seen us, 
O, we that were dear, we are ail-too near 

With the thick of the world between us. 

O, Death and Time, they chime and chime 

Like bells at sunset falling ! — 
They end the song, they right the wrong. 

They set the old echoes calling : 
For Death and Time bring on the prime 

Of God*s own chosen weather. 
And we lie in the peace of the Great Release 

As once in the grass together. 

February 1891 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 243 



XX 

The shadow of Dawn ; 

Stillness and stars and over-mastering dreams 

Of Life and Death and Sleep ; 

Heard over gleaming flats, the old, unchanging 

sound 
Of the old, unchanging Sea. 

My soul and yours — 

O, hand in hand let us fare forth, two ghosts, 

Into the ghostliness. 

The infinite and abounding solitudes, 

Beyond — O, beyond ! — beyond . . . 

Here in the porch 

Upon the multitudinous silences 

Of the kingdoms of the grave. 

We twain are you and I — two ghosts Omnipotence 

Can touch no more ... no more ! 



244 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 



XXI 

When the wind storms by with a shout, and the 

stern sea-caves 
Rejoice in the tramp and the roar of onsetting 

waves, 
Then, then, it comes home to the heart that the 

top of life 
Is the passion that burns the blood in the act of 

strife — 
Till you pity the dead down there in their quiet 

graves. 

But to drowse with the fen behind and the fog 

before, 
When the rain-rot spreads, and a tame sea mumbles 

the shore, 
Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no 

wrong, 
Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your 

sire's old song — 
O, you envy the blessed dead that can live no more! 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 245 



XXII 



Trees and the menace of night ; 

Then a long, lonely, leaden mere 

Backed by a desolate fell, 

As by a spectral battlement ; and then, 

Low-brooding, interpenetrating all, 

A vast, gray, listless, inexpressive sky, 

So beggared, so incredibly bereft 

Of starlight and the song of racing worlds. 

It might have bellied down upon the Void 

Where as in terror Light was beginning to be. 

Hist ! In the trees fulfilled of night 
(Night and the wretchedness of the sky) 
Is it the hurry of the rain ? 
Or the noise of a drive of the Dead, 
Streaming before the irresistible Will 



246 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

Through the strange dusk of this, the 

Debateable Land 
Between their place and ours ? 

Like the forgetfulness 

Of the work-a-day world made visible, 

A mist falls from the melancholy sky. 

A messenger from some lost and loving soul, 

Hopeless, far wandered, dazed 

Here in the provinces of life, 

A great white moth fades miserably past. 

Thro* the trees in the strange dead night, 
Under the vast dead sky. 
Forgetting and forgot, a drift of Dead 
Sets to the mystic mere, the phantom fell, 
And the unimagined vastitudes beyond. 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 247 



XXIII 

To p. A. G. 

Here they trysted, here they strayed, 

In the leafage dewy and boon, 
Many a man and many a maid, 

And the morn was merry June. 
' Death is fleet. Life is sweet,' 

Sang the blackbird in the may ; 
And the hour with flying feet, 

While they dreamed, was yesterday. 

Many a maid and many a man 

Found the leafage close and boon ; 
Many a destiny began — 

O, the morn was merry June ! 
Dead and gone, dead and gone, 

(Hark the blackbird in the may !), 
Life and Death went hurrying on. 

Cheek on cheek— and where were they ? 



248 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

Dust on dust engendering dust 

In the leafage fresh and boon, 
Man and maid fulfil their trust — 

Still the morn turns merry June. 
Mother Life, Father Death 

(O, the blackbird in the may !), 
Each the other's breath for breath, 

Fleet the times of the world away. 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 249 



XXIV 

To A. C. 

Not to the staring Day, 

For all the importunate questionings he pursues 

In his big, violent voice, 

Shall those mild things of bulk and multitude, 

The Trees — God's sentinels 

Over His gift of live, life-giving air, 

Yield of their huge, unutterable selves. 

Midsummer-manifold, each one 

Voluminous, a labyrinth of life. 

They keep their greenest musings, and the dim 

dreams 
That haunt their leafier privacies. 
Dissembled, baffling the random gapeseed still 
With blank full-faces, or the innocent guile 
Of laughter flickering back from shine to shade, 
And disappearances of homing birds, 



250 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

And frolicsome freaks 

Of little boughs that frisk with little boughs. 

But at the word 

Of the ancient, sacerdotal Night, 

Night of the many secrets, whose effect — 

Transfiguring, hierophantic, dread — 

Themselves alone may fully apprehend, 

They tremble and are changed. 

In each, the uncouth individual soul 

Looms forth and glooms 

Essential, and, their bodily presences 

Touched with inordinate significance, 

Wearing the darkness like the livery 

Of some mysterious and tremendous guild, 

They brood — they menace — they appal ; 

Or the anguish of prophecy tears them, and they 

wring 
Wild hands of warning in the face 
Of some inevitable advance of doom ; 
Or, each to the other bending, beckoning, signing 
As in some monstrous market-place. 
They pass the news, these Gossips of the Prime, 
In that old speech their forefathers 
Learned on the lawns of Eden, ere they heard 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 251 

The troubled voice of Eve 

Naming the wondering folk of Paradise. 

Your sense is sealed, or you should hear them 

tell 
The tale of their dim life, with all 
Its compost of experience : how the Sun 
Spreads them their daily feast, 
Sumptuous, of light, firing them as with wine ; 
Of the old Moon's fitful solicitude 
And those mild messages the Stars 
Descend in silver silences and dews ; 
Or what the sweet-breathing West, 
Wanton with wading in the swirl of the wheat, 
Said, and their leafage laughed ; 
And how the wet-winged Angel of the Rain 
Came whispering . . . whispering ; and the gifts 

of the Year — 
The sting of the stirring sap 
Under the wizardry of the young-eyed Spring, 
Their summer amplitudes of pomp. 
Their rich autumnal melancholy, and the shrill, 
Embittered housewifery 
Of the lean Winter : all such things. 
And with them all the goodness of the Master, 



252 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

Whose right hand blesses with increase and 

life, 
Whose left hand honours with decay and death. 

Thus under the constraint of Night 

These gross and simple creatures, 

Each in his scores of rings, which rings are years, 

A servant of the Will ! 

And God, the Craftsman, as He walks 

The floor of His workshop, hearkens, full of cheer 

In thus accomplishing 

The aims of His miraculous artistry. 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 253 



XXV 



What have I done for you, 

England, my England ? 
What is there I would not do, 

England, my own ? 
With your glorious eyes austere. 
As the Lord were walking near. 
Whispering terrible things and dear 

As the Song on your bugles blown, 
England — 

Round the world on your bugles blown ! 

Where shall the watchful Sun, 

England, my England, 
Match the master-work you Ve done, 

England, my own ? 
When shall he rejoice agen 
Such a breed of mighty men 
As come forward, one to ten, 

To the Song on your bugles blown, 
England — 

Down the years on your bugles blown ? 



254 RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 

Ever the faith endures, 

England, my England : — 

* Take and break us : we are yours, 

* England, my own ! 

* Life is good, and joy runs high 
' Between English earth and sky : 

' Death is death ; but we shall die 

* To the Song on your bugles blown, 

* England — 

* To the stars on your bugles blown ! 

They call you proud and hard, 

England, my England : 
You with worlds to watch and ward, 

England, my own ! 
You whose mailed hand keeps the keys 
Of such teeming destinies 
You could know nor dread nor ease 

Were the Song on your bugles blown, 
England, 

Round the Pit on your bugles blown ! 

Mother of Ships whose might, 
England, my England, 



RHYMES AND RHYTHMS 255 

Is the fierce old Sea's delight, 

England, my own, 
Chosen daughter of the Lord, 
Spouse-in-Chief of the ancient sword, 
There 's the menace of the Word 

In the Song on your bugles blown, 
England — 

Out of heaven on your bugles blown ! 



EPILOGUE 

ThesCy to you now^ O, more than ever now — 

l^ow that the Ancient Enemy 

Has passed, and we, we two that are one^ have seen 

A piece of perfect Life 

'Turn to so ravishing a shape of Death 

The Arch-Discomforter might well have smiled 

In pity and pride, 

Even as he bore his lovely and innocent spoil 

From those home-kingdoms he left desolate ! 

Poor windlestraws 

On the great ^ sullen, roaring pool of Time 

And Chance and Change, I know I 

But they are yours, as I am, till we attain 

That end for which we make, we two that are one : 

A little, exquisite Ghost 

Between us, smiling with the serenest eyes 

Seen in this world, and calling, calling still 

In that clear voice whose infinite subtleties 

Of sweetness, thrilling back across the grave. 

Break the poor heart to hear : — 

^ Come, Dadsie, come ! 
Mama, how long — how long ! ' 

July 1897. 














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